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Subject: Re: questions about WAC

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 06:33:44 12/27/01

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On December 27, 2001 at 09:26:46, Uri Blass wrote:

>I understand from other posts that it was fail high that
>was not confirmed but I still do not understand how fail high
>can be wrong.
>
>I read in bruce pages that it happens only to strong programs
>and I also remember from previous discussion about MTD that
>it is related with hash tables.
>
>Is the reason for the fail high that were not confirmed only
>null moves or also hash tables?

Both individually can cause it.

With nullmove, the reduced depth search can hide a threat,
and cause the search to fail high when it should not.

When researching with a different window, the nullmove score
can be too low to get an immediate cutoff from the reduced
depth search, and the full search can fail low instead because
of a threat that the reduced depth search had not seen.

With hashtables, it is possible that a deep entry was left
over in the hashtable because of pondering, and that it had
already gotten overwritten before the research reached the
relevant position. The result from a shallow search has to be
used, which can have a (very) different value than the deep
result that caused the initial fail high.

>I am also interested to see the tree that cause
>to this problem

I cannot trivially construct one, sorry.

>chessbase interface can understand tree so if it is possible
>to post a practical tree as small as possible
>that cause the problem with comments after every node
>(like number of node,alpha value,beta value)
>then it may be productive for me to look at it
>
>I think that a program that translate nodes of a program to a tree that
>chessbase interface can understand may be productive
>for chess programming because I believe that
>looking at the tree node after node
>may be productive to get ideas.

Remi Coulom has an excellent utility on his homepage to
browse through large search trees. I have not been able
to get my program to output data it can handle, though.

--
GCP



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