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Subject: Oh I ponder, ponder... What?

Author: Artem Pyatakov

Date: 19:20:18 08/13/01


Well, After tweaking my time control and some of my history settings, it seems
like I have pondering under control and it DOES help my engine go about one ply
deeper when it guesses the right move - thanks to people who responded to my
last post about pondering.

I was wondering about a scenario, however, and about how people handled it in
their engine (just for fun, I will lay this out like a traditional math/physics
problem):

Initial conditions:
Let's say the normal search produced a PV of length=1, because the very first
move produced a hit in the hash (transposition table).

Problem:
Right now in my engine, I do not ponder in these cases, because I have no idea
what opponent move to ponder about (it's not in the PV).

Possible Solutions:
1) I am guessing that it is often possible to discover the "next" move in the PV
by simply looking at the transposition table once again and seeing if we can
extend the PV further

2) May be I should try to ponder about a different move??? I just don't like the
idea of my engine wasting time...

3) Any other ideas about how this problem can be addressed? I know this is
probably not a very important thing, but I was just curious about a possible
solution.

Thank you.

Artem



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