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Subject: Re: developing Junior (and other pro programs)

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 03:29:37 08/30/02

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On August 30, 2002 at 05:51:37, Sune Fischer wrote:

>On August 30, 2002 at 05:26:04, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>This is exactly the case for Junior and Fritz and they simply do not care about
>>small improvement that they can get.
>>
>>They know that there are positions when the program cannot see simple tactics
>>but they do not care to fix it.
>>
>>There are positions when Junior cannot see simple tactics and Amir ban knows
>>about it but he did not fix it at least not in Junior7(some years after he got
>>the information).
>>
>>There are positions when Fritz cannot see simple mate because of null move
>>pruning.
>
>I think they do care, but if it's only in a few weird special cases then it's
>not important. They tune their programs for the most likely positions, not the
>most unlikely ones. It will cost too much in normal positions if they have to
>take care of all the special cases.
>
>>I also know that not seeing simple tactic may be relevant in rare cases
>>for games but they do not fix it by having some verification search against
>>zunzwangs and it is possible to have verficiation search(yace does it).
>
>I don't know what a 'verification search' is, but I bet it isn't free to do, so
>in some positions they surely must be weaker because they 'waste' time on this
>verification.

It is better to be 0.1% slower in order to avoid stupid mistakes even if the
mistakes happens only one time out of 500 games and there was one engine-engine
game when I saw a stupid mistake.

I believe that they can do it.

Here is a simple idea(this idea can be improved but the point is that even this
idea can do their program better)

Before searching if there is a threat to depth x>12 do a small search to depth
((x-10)/2) and get an exact score of the position when it is white to move and
when it is black to move.

If you see that the exact scores suggest a big zugzwang do not use null move
pruning.

The only reason that I did not use that kind of idea(with smaller number than
10) in movei is that I found that it cause movei to search more nodes in other
branches of the tree so I guess that I should be careful to define a special
search function that does not change history tables,killer moves or hash tables
in order to use that idea in a productive way.

Uri



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