Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto
Date: 04:55:07 09/24/01
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From personal mail: Hey, Sorry i'm a bit TOO new to this :) .. can you explain to me what these mean: MTD SEE MVV LVA WAC ECM SOL ------ MTD Memory Enhanced Test Driver This is a class of search algorithms invented by Aske Plaat and very throughly described in his thesis, which you can get off the internet. Consider it recommanded reading! Basically, he proved that SSS, a search algorithm that was provably better than the alphabeta we use, could be implemented practically as a sequence of special alphabeta searches with a hash/transposition table. He improved upon this method a little more, and arrived at the best currently know sequential search method. It is theoretically better than PVS+aspiration window (used in most chessprograms today) but brings a few more unexpected problems which cause some people to avoid it. It's very interesting material but perhaps not ideal for a beginner. SEE Static Exchange Evaluation SEE has multiple meanings, but it's most often used as referring to a method to do move ordering. SEE tries to figure out whether a certain capture will win or lose material, and how much. You can also use it to prune losing captures in the quiescent search, which some people find helps a lot. It's more expensive than MVV/LVA, but it's certainly worth trying!. MVV/LVA Most Valuable Victim/Least Valuable Attacker This is also a method to order capturing moves. The basic idea is that you subtract the index (pawn=1,queen=4) of the capturer of the value of the captured piece. It's less accurate then SEE but easier to compute and nice to start with. WAC Win at Chess This is a testset consisting of 300 positions from a book with the same name. If you are just getting started developing your program this is interesting testing material. One you get a little further, most stuff in it may get too easy. ECM Encyclopedia of Chess Middlegames Another testset from a book. ECM contains harder positions than WAC, but also a lot more wrong solutions. There are several 'cleaned-out' versions available, one of which is my own, WAC2/ECM-GCP, which was posted here an hour or so ago. It should be more interesting to test with this instead of WAC, because that is what it was made for. SOL Sh*, Outta Luck State which you don't want to be in to. -- GCP
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