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Subject: Re: Disadvantages of failsoft ?

Author: Ulrich Tuerke

Date: 04:29:30 05/25/02

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On May 24, 2002 at 19:41:52, José Carlos wrote:

>On May 24, 2002 at 18:14:57, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>
>>   I was looking at the source of crafty and saw that on a fail low, the value
>>returned is alpha, rather than Max of all the values from the level below. Is
>>there some disadvantage in returning the real upper bound? I think it causes
>>some problems in Crafty making it much slower resolving fail-highs and fail-lows
>>at the root as these branches all need to be re-searched.
>
>  I use fail soft because I think (not tested) that it generates smaller trees
>generally.
>  The drawback is that what you call "real upper bound" is no always so. Null
>move and hashing make the search return "not totally correct bounds" some times.

What do you mean by "not totally correct bound" ?
I don't care for truth or correctness in my chess program; the aim is just to
find a good move. In case my fail high verification search is failing low, I
just stick to the alpha of the verification search and go on searching the
remaining moves. I think, that's not really a problem.

Regards,
Uli

>It is very common that you fail high in the root, research with a different
>window and get a fail low.
>  So fail hard makes search more stable (it's less probable to get such
>instabilities if you always return the search bounds).
>
>  José C.



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