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Subject: Re: Odd ply´s (as in odd/even) are strange, why?

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 05:54:49 06/22/02

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On June 22, 2002 at 08:23:01, Stan Arts wrote:

>Hello,

Hi,

What you have described sounds like a horizon problem.
Are you doing quiescent search to terminate at a 'quiet' position?
Your queen certainly shouldn't plunge into pawns just before an evaluation.

Take a look at this tutorial by Bruce Moreland:
http://www.seanet.com/~brucemo/topics/topics.htm

in particular the quiescent part.

-S.

>Last time I wrote a question regarding strange behaviour of my simple fixed
>depth alpha beta program. Indeed there was a bug in the program causing this
>behaviour. Thanks for suggesting this because I had looked over my program
>many times thinking there weren´t so I simply experimented a lot until I
>located the error.  Thanks! It now calculates "perfect" it seems! (=play as
>should be expected upto X ply deep) Just like a real chessprogram... :)
>
>Anyway, now I noticed something else strange to the play of my program. When
>it´s searching, on EVEN ply´s (for instance 6, or 8) it seems to play 100%
>correct. But on ODD ply´s (like 5 or 7) sometimes it makes mistakes. (In the
>calculationtree I count the 1st ply to be the possible moves by the computer,
>of which one of these will actually be played after calculation. , so say a
>5 ply deep search by my program is 3 moves by the computer, and 2 by the
>opponent, and therefore, the deepest ply (5th) is that way a computermove)
>Now I looked over the code very often, but can not find an error, but this
>morning I suddenly thought of this:  When doing a fixed depth search, without
>extensions, would these evaluation errors on ODD ply´s come from the fact
>that on this 5th ply it would for instance plunge it´s queen into a random
>(protected) pawn because on the deepest move, ofcourse it can´t see a
>recapture? And therefore mess up the evaluation because it thinks it can get
>this material back? It seems to happen just rarely luckly, but I imagine in
>some occasions with a queen centrally located for instance and on a shallow
>search such as just 5 ply (not much change to the total position), this
>material gain would show up in EVERY branch and therefore mess up the
>evaluation?
>
>Would this be right and did anyone have the same problem? because then it´s
>not a bug and I would sleep a little better at night...
>
>:)
>
>Stan



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