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Subject: Re: More correct analysis here...

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 02:29:07 02/03/02

Go up one level in this thread


On February 03, 2002 at 04:04:45, Graham Laight wrote:

>On February 02, 2002 at 12:01:53, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>As I mentioned in the past, on more than one occasion they had said "we did
>>an N ply search there" and when I saw their output it said N(X).  I didn't give
>>it any thought until I finally asked "what is that X value?".  And Murray or
>>Hsu explained it.  I then asked "why did you say N ply?" and one of them
>>responded "the hardware search is much simpler than the real software search
>>and we tend to think of that as a unique form of a 'static evaluation' even
>>though it does include a search + capture search."
>>
>>IE I guess that if I had had that kind of design, I would probably shorten
>>the reference to depth to just include the software depth since (at least for
>>deep thought) it seemed that the hardware depth was generally statically fixed
>>to 4 or 5 (I don't recall exactly which I saw).  DB seemed to be a bit more
>>dynamic in that they could do an 9(5) iteration and then either a 10(5) or
>>9(6) iteration next.
>>
>>That was why I specifically asked the question about the depth, because I had
>>seem them use "depth" in what I considered to be an ambiguous way and after we
>>all started examining their logs it seemed important to understand their stuff.
>>
>>There are other "hints" about this.  Remember that the chess hardware has
>>absolutely no way to return a PV move of any kind.  So _every_ PV you see
>>produced by their program was absolutely searched by the software part of
>>the machine _only_.  When you see 10(6) you can now _know_ that in addition
>>to whatever PV you see (and it may well not be a full PV as they could only
>>get the PV from the hash table which is not 100% reliable in producing moves
>>particularly near the end of a PV) there _must_ be at _least_ 6 more PV moves
>>(non-captures) plus the q-search moves.  The Chess processors didn't do SE,
>>but it did do classic extensions like in-check and recapture, because it was
>>copied directly from Belle which did the same things.
>>
>>In short, _every_ PV you see has at least (N) more non-capture moves on the
>>end of it, plus their q-search...  If you look at their output carefully,
>>you begin to get the idea of their search, because it is _definitely_ a fact
>>that the hardware provides no PV information of any kind, period.  Look at the
>>PVs you see and when you realize that they can only come from the X(Y) (the X
>>part only) part of the search, things begin to make sense.  Vincent sees a
>>8(4) depth and 12 moves and says "aha, that is obviously a 12 ply search and
>>PV" even though it should now be obvious that that 12 ply PV came from the 8
>>part of the software search, not from the 4 part of the hardware search.
>
>If the chess chips did not produce a PV (Position Valuation), then what was
>their output, and how did it contribute to the move selection, please?


pv means principal variation and not position valuation.

Uri



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