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Subject: Re: Whither Null Move?

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 19:07:48 08/20/01

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Found the reason for why null move was erroring so badly.

And... the winner is .... Georg ... who came closest with his reply:

  Have you checked your MakeMove(). Does it really only change color
  on move when the from-square is zero (and maybe the ep-square to 0)?
  How does your unmake move work btw ? Where do you store the unmake
  info for every ply ?

The makemove/unmakemove routines were each changing the side
to move *twice* for the case of the null move, once to the opposite
side, and once back again (once each for all other non null moves),
basically no-oping each other for the side to move. Since the null
move already does nothing in terms of making a piece move, there's no
point in changing the side to move either. Just leave it as it already
was in makemove/unmakemove (i.e. change the side to move once for each,
just don't make a move.)

When I did this, variations went back to as before without nullmove and
the time to search was halved. With a few other improvements, it sure
is nice to see an 8 ply search finish in 3 seconds on a dinky notebook. :-)

Stuart



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