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Subject: Re: passed pawn extension

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 11:00:15 01/29/02

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On January 29, 2002 at 12:21:56, James Swafford wrote:

>On January 29, 2002 at 09:53:21, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On January 28, 2002 at 23:20:45, James Swafford wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>Does anybody do this?  I just implemented a passed pawn extension
>>>that extends the depth by 1 if the move was a pawn move to the
>>>sixth or seventh rank, and that pawn is not blocked by a pawn of
>>>the opposite color.
>>>
>>>The results are pretty disappointing.  It really blew up my search.
>>>I decided to modify the implementation by saying only looking for
>>>pawn pushes to the seventh rank, and it still can blow up pretty
>>>bad.
>>>
>>>Obviously most over the board positions would not trigger this
>>>extension, but there are some that would blow up the search like
>>>mad.
>>>
>>>One thought I had is to use a fractional extension scheme.  That
>>>may help, but I'd like to know if anybody else does this extension,
>>>and what mechanisms they have in place to keep the search bloat
>>>under control.
>>>
>>>It's interesting to note that Bruce lists five different extensions
>>>on his (excellent) web page; he hasn't actually written about any of
>>>them yet, but passed pawn isn't even listed.  Hmm...
>>>
>>>Any ideas or comments?
>>>
>>>--
>>>James
>>
>>
>>I extend 3/4 ply when a passer reaches the 7th.  But that only happens on the
>>ply where it is pushed to the 7th...
>
>I knew you did fractional ply extensions from some time back.
>How do you deal with the fraction once all extensions have been
>added up?  For example, if you end up with extensions totalling
>1.75 ply, do you truncate or round?


Truncate, sort of.


When I do a 1 ply search, I start "depth" at 1.50...  so that the first two
.75 ply extensions will "trigger" a deeper search:  1.5 + .75 = 2.25, truncated
to 2...  2.25 + .75 = 3.00, which is 3 plies.  But 3.00 + .75 is still 3.00
so the third fractional extension doesn't trigger.  But the next three
will thanks to that .75 "head-start" just added in by the extension that didn't
make it go deeper...  Basically this says that 3 of every 4 3/4 ply extensions
will really make us go deeper, which helps to control the tree explosions...



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