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Subject: Re: null move margin ?!

Author: Thorsten Czub

Date: 13:26:37 07/30/02

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On July 30, 2002 at 15:17:39, Uri Blass wrote:

>On July 30, 2002 at 15:02:25, Tony Werten wrote:
>
>>On July 30, 2002 at 13:56:53, Thorsten Czub wrote:
>>
>>>in an old program i can set the null move margin on or off.
>>>what is the function doing ? any ideas or explanations from the programmers?
>>
>>I'll give it a guess.
>>
>>Normally when you do a nullmove and the score returned is > beta you get a
>>cutoff. The idea is that if doing nothing already gives bigger than beta, doing
>>something would give even more.
>>
>>You can go one step further with this idea. Since doing something would be
>>better than doing nothing, then doing nothing doesn't have to be > beta but only
>>> beta - margin since I expect that a move is worth at least "margin"
>>
>>Tony
>
>I thought about the opposite.
>
>Null move pruning was considered to be a dangerous pruning because you may miss
>threats and this is probably the reason that programmers like richard lang never
>used it.
>
>If you want to be more careful in pruning you may try to prune only moves when
>the score after null move is at least beta+margin.
>
>Thorsten asked about an old program so it is logical to guess that they tried to
>reduce the demage by using null move margin.
>
>It is possible to find who is right simply by finding if increasing the null
>move margin help the program to get bigger depth.
>
>If increasing the null move margin help the program to get bigger nominal depth
>then Tony is probably right.
>
>Uri


thanks. i will let you know :-))) about it. i will try it out.



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