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Subject: Re: Crafty PVS question

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 10:05:02 09/01/02

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On September 01, 2002 at 06:19:33, Alvaro Jose Povoa Cardoso wrote:

>>>Difference is that Crafty used alpha instead of value when it re-searches.
>>>Is there any reason to use alpha instead of value?
>>>Using value which is greater than alpha seems to cause more cutoffs than using
>>>alpha.
>>>
>>>Thanks in advance.
>>
>>I do this only because it is possible to fail low on the re-search, and now you
>>have the question of whether this fail-high/fail-low means anything.  I choose
>>to go to the full window so that if it fails low, I know it is not good and I
>>can ignore the fail high.  This is a null-move / hashing artifact that simply
>>happens to anyone doing PVS, null-move and hashing, all together...
>
>
>Just curious, if we removed null-move, would that artifact still happen?
>In other words, would PVS+hashing cause that?

Yes.  Say you do a really deep search while pondering, and store position X
with a big depth and a score>x.xx type lower bound.

Now your opponent plays a different move, you start the search over.  But
many times, you reach position X via transpositions, and you pop out that
score>x.xx and it causes you to fail high.  But on the re-search, you fail
low because now you are on your own, and can't use that big-depth table
entry to help because alpha and beta have been raised.

This is not terribly common, but it can obviously happen...

It can also happen without the big pondering search, just because of how
the hash table works..

>
>Regards,
>Alvaro Cardoso



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