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Subject: Re: adjusting bounds

Author: Georg v. Zimmermann

Date: 15:22:26 09/02/01

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On September 02, 2001 at 15:48:26, Dieter Buerssner wrote:

>On September 02, 2001 at 12:52:21, Georg v. Zimmermann wrote:
>
>>How do you prune window dependent ?
>
>Isn't (almost) all pruning window dependent? With null move, you compare with
>beta. With futility pruning you compare with alpha.

Hehe I am seriously braindead today. I was reading "pruning" and thinking
"extending".

What you say below is making a lot of sense. The >= I will need to think about
when less tired.
The NullMove thing might be not too much of a problem. Shouldn't it happen very
very seldom ? It can be a problem in endgame we all know and know how to fix. It
can also be a problem when there is a quiet threat, because of R being > 1. But
with todays search depths, how often do you get a position where you get mated
in 10 halfmoves if you pass, but don't lose material in 9 halfmoves if you do ?

Regards,
Georg


>You have a lower bound score in the hash with enough depth. Say the score is +10
>(which means it was shown to be >= +10 in the earlier search). If you adjust
>alpha to 10, and the exact score of this node would actually be +10 (the "=" in
>">="), this score will not be inside the new (adjusted) alpha-beta window,
>because the bounds are not inside the window (at least with the normal
>formulation of alpha-beta search, that I am used to).

I'll have to think about the >= thing a bit. This is interesting.

>What I mean about the additional inconsistencies added by adjusting the bounds
>due to window dependent pruning may be depicted by the following example:
>
>A position was searched to depth 10 with beta=0. The null move fails high. It
>can happen, that if you would search this with no null move, that it really
>would not fail high. It might be a score of -30 or something. But you don't know
>this yet.

>You store 0 as lower bound score in the hash table. You revisit this
>node at depth 10. Say this time with a window of (-50,50); so beta is 50. Now
>you adjust alpha to 0. Because of the higher beta, the null move shall not give
>a cutoff this time. You search all moves with the window (0,50). And you can get
>a fail low, because the former null move score was wrong. Without adjusting the
>bound you may get a perfect exact score (-30) and a PV. With adjusting, you can
>end up with a too high score, that may find its way back to the root, and
>perhaps a real problem is only seen at one higher depth.
>
>All this said, I adjust the bounds. But I don't see a big difference by this.
>
>Regards,
>Dieter



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