Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: time management & fail low/high

Author: martin fierz

Date: 17:13:10 05/29/02


i'm preparing my engine for a computer checkers tournament, where i will have to
have some real time management for the first time. right now, i only have fixed
time per move, which i implemented as

if(time_elapsed < 0.5*time_to_think)
  do next iterative deepening
else
  return move

and in the search:
if(time_elapsed > 4*time_to_think)
   abort search, return best move of last iteration

it occured to me that this might not be the best way to do it ;-)
i thought that if i'm past the 0.5*time_to_think limit and run into
a fail-high for a certain move, and i also notice that i am already close
to aborting the search, then i could just play the fail-high move anyway without
really knowing how bad it is.
on the other hand, i thought that if i'm in a fail-low condition, i might not
want to abort the search even if i am past the originally allotted thinking
time. does this make any sense? what are you guys doing?

one more thing: i used to use a windowed search, where i knew what a fail-high
and a fail-low was. then i switched to MTD - now i'm not really sure how to
translate the above thoughts to MTD... any ideas?

cheers
  martin



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.