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Subject: Re: Move Ordering and Transpostion Tables -- A Question

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 11:07:43 08/13/01

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On August 13, 2001 at 00:01:35, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On August 12, 2001 at 23:49:35, Pham Minh Tri wrote:
>
>>How about the UPPER? Should we choose the move has score nearest alpha (the
>>highest score or the first of highest ones)? Perhaps store something is better
>>than nothing.
>>
>
>Nope.  Something is not better than nothing here.  In a LOWER position, every
>move was refuted by the next ply.

I am not sure, if I understand LOWER here. Don't you mean an upper bound
position: One for which you have a score, that is an upper bound (so the score
is this or lower). Or in other words, the search failed low for this position.

>You know nothing about which move is best,
>only that every move is bad.  Better to let normal move ordering take over
>here rather than taking a guess.  Note that even picking the move closest to
>alpha is worthless...  because the scores are not produced so that this will
>work.  You won't know how bad each move is, just that each one is bad...
>
>Store a zero, and try normal ordering ideas like good captures, etc...

I have found a small reduction of tree sizes, when keeping track of and storing
upper bound moves in the hash table. I don't necessarily try them first in the
search, but just shuffle them a bit up in the move ordering. The difference to
Crafty might be, that I almost exclusively use fail soft alpha-beta. So, instead
of all moves having the same score, the scores can (and will) vary in the case
of fail low. For example, for any move, besides one there may be a mate score.

Regards,
Dieter




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