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Subject: Re: Good, Bad and Active Bishop

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 03:52:14 01/11/02

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On January 10, 2002 at 21:39:07, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On January 10, 2002 at 17:50:46, Dan Andersson wrote:
>
>>One reason that search is discussed so much is, IMO. That the static scores of
>>evaluators are 'always' wrong. It means that an efficient and intelligent search
>>(including extensions) will trumph a less efficient search allmost all the time.
>>Due to the fact that the search essentially 'mines' the search space for a more
>>accurate evaluation. A much better approach is to tailor your evaluator to your
>>search. Granted that a good evaluator is preferable to a bad one. But making it
>>behave consistently inside your search framework is the number one priority.
>
>Not exactly the truth. A simple alfabetasearch + nullmove + hashtables
>+ simple qsearch is going to beat any other program if evaluation is
>real good and the opponents is no good.
>
>Whatever your search, remember that the pro's are 99% busy with just
>evaluation and testing.
>
>Search is like 0.001% of the time invested.

I am sure that programmers waste more than 0.001% of their time about search
rules.

wasting 0.001% of you time about search meaning wasting less than an hour about
search.

only writing null move+fail high+fail low takes more than 1 hour.

>
>the reason why most like to fiddle with search is
>  - lossless speedups are easy to measure
>  - it is easy to modify something and test
>  - there are great tactical testsets to see whether your
>    search is finding tactical more (also at the same time saying
>    that for tournament results this says nothing about engine
>    strength)

I do not believe that the tactical tests are great.

A good tactical test should be avoiding tactical errors.

Tactical errors are often done without sacrifices and existing test suites
do not reveal it.

In order to build a good tactical test it is better to analyze a lot of
comp-comp games in order to find tactical errors when the target of program
should be simply to avoid a tactical error.

part of the tactcial errors can be seen as positional errors by humans.

A change in the search rules is probably positive if the program can avoid
tactical errors faster.

Uri



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