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Subject: Re: This is getting boring

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 12:53:51 01/30/02

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On January 30, 2002 at 14:06:04, Uri Blass wrote:

>On January 30, 2002 at 11:04:18, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On January 30, 2002 at 10:12:25, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:
>>
>>>Why are you blindly assuming that their effective branching factor
>>>is 40, just because that is the average number of legal chess
>>>moves? You should know better. And I know you do.
>>
>>branching factor is not the issue here GCP and you know it.
>>the total number of nodes needed when assuming a theoretical
>>minimum here is more important.
>>
>>Please get your college book again and see that this is about
>>the squareroot of the number of legal moves.
>>
>>The average number of legal moves, not counting checking positions as
>>those get extended, it is 40.
>>
>>so squareroot(40) is what you need for nodes.
>>
>>>They used PVS. Aspiration windows. Hashtables for the first TWELVE
>>>plies. Even futility pruning.
>>
>>In 1998 and 1999 it was mentionned by direct postings from Hsu
>>and others that they only did a fullwidth search not a single form
>>of pruning as they disbelieved this, Bob has quoted that zillions of
>>times in these years.
>>
>>Now in 2002 to explain some theoretical impossibilities a pruning
>>technique for QUIESCENCESEARCH is getting quoted, don't confuse that
>>with the alfabeta search.
>>
>>>I tested this. I crippled my program. No hashing in the last 6 plies,
>>>no nullmove, no pruning except futility, all extensions on.
>>
>>>I didn't get an effective branching factor of 40. Far from it.
>>
>>>The _worst_ I saw was around 20, on _average_ it was only about 10 or
>>>even less.
>>
>>that would make it 18^20 then in your case = 9^400,
>>where i used 18^squareroot(40) = 9^40, get the point?
>
>I also believe that deeper blue could not search 18 plies but your numbers are
>wrong
>18^(squareroot(40))<9^40

Yes sorry there is a small mistake here.

I mean

  squareroot(40) ^ 18 is their total tree

  this is the same as 40^9 which is the number as i calculated upon.

So it is 40^9 not 9^40 i was talking about.

>Without hash tables even if we assume perfect move ordering it is easy to see
>that the theoretic limit under some reasonable assumption is too high(even if
>you assume 25 nodes per position(in the middle game there are usually more than
>it) you get
>25^(18/2)=25^9 and it is clear that deeper blue could not search 25^9 nodes
>even at 10^9 nodes per second.

>I see no mathematical proof that 18 plies of brute force search is impossible
>when hash tables are used but I believe that it is practically impossible.

without hashtables deep blue searched last 6 plies and before that it
used all kind of extensions and it didn't forward prune a single node
even, except perhaps in qsearch on alfa and beta (note that pruning on
alpha there is very dubious, but that fits in the picture of a guy
who is just creating a machine that overpowers everything in nodes
a second but not in search depth).

>Uri



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