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Subject: Re: Branching factor, etc

Author: Omid David

Date: 11:02:14 08/31/02

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On August 31, 2002 at 13:55:41, Uri Blass wrote:

>On August 31, 2002 at 11:11:50, Ralf Elvsén wrote:
>
>>On August 31, 2002 at 05:34:11, Uri Blass wrote:
>>
>>>On August 31, 2002 at 04:51:49, Ralf Elvsén wrote:
>>>
>>>>On August 30, 2002 at 23:00:30, Andreas Herrmann wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On August 30, 2002 at 21:03:25, Uri Blass wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>I know this :-)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>But there is the odd/even issue, so the b-factor can change drastically while
>>>>>>>>moving from an odd ply to an even ply, and vice versa.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>I think the best is to calculate an average branching factor from all plys.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>bf[avg] = ( bf[2] + bf[3] + bf[4] ... + bf[n] ) / (n - 1)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Andreas
>>>>>>
>>>>>>It is better to use
>>>>>>( bf[2] * bf[3] * bf[4] ... * bf[n] )^(1/(n-1))
>>>>
>>>>Not if the numbers bf[i] are ratios of the type bf[i] = T[i]/T[i-1] (e.g.)
>>>>Then everything will cancel out except for the first and last T[i]
>>>
>>>I think that this is exactly the idea about branching factor.
>>>The question is if I need 1 second to get depth 1 how many seconds I need to get
>>>depth n.
>>>
>>>It is also possible to use the formula (T(n)/T(1))^(1/n-1)
>>>
>>>Uri
>>
>>
>>Well, it all depends on what you want. I personally wouldn't like this
>>measure to depend heavily on T(1) which I would expect to vary much.
>>And if you have a series for T which is
>>
>>T1 = 1 T2 = 2 T3 = 4 T4 = 16 T5 = 64
>>
>>and another
>>
>>T1 = 1 T2 = 4 T3 = 16 T4 = 32 T5 = 64
>>
>>then you have very different branching factors for low/high plies
>>(relatively speaking) but the proposed formula gives the same
>>overall value. So you are throwing away information and (in my
>>opinion) relies heavily on a suspect value: T(1).
>>
>>Just my opinion...
>
>( bf[2] + bf[3] + bf[4] ... + bf[n] ) / (n - 1) is also the same in both
>examples so I see no advantage for using that formula.
>
>You cannot have all information in one number but if n is relatively big the
>first iterations do not change much.
>
>Uri

Once I thought of the following:

Just take all nodes of the last iteration (iteration n), and calculate its
"n-1"th root:

b-factor = (nodes in iteration n) ^ (1 / (n - 1)).



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