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Subject: Re: Couple of chess programming questions: another MTD drawback

Author: martin fierz

Date: 18:01:49 09/10/02

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On September 10, 2002 at 20:45:43, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On September 10, 2002 at 18:06:01, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:
>
>>On September 10, 2002 at 17:51:11, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On September 10, 2002 at 17:43:15, martin fierz wrote:
>>>
>>>>On September 10, 2002 at 17:18:24, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On September 10, 2002 at 17:10:38, martin fierz wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On September 10, 2002 at 09:26:14, Eli Liang wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>(3) Reading Aske Plaat's search & re-search paper, it really seems like mtd(f)
>>>>>>>is something of a magic bullet.  But I note it seems that more programs don't
>>>>>>>use it than do (for example Crafty).  What is wrong with mtd(f) which Plaat
>>>>>>>doesn't say?
>>>>>
>>>>>losing 1 bit is a problem for you?
>>>>
>>>>nope. losing 2 bytes is more like it...
>>>
>>>who stores a bound in 2 bytes?
>>>
>>>Why not in 1 bit?
>>
>>You want to store two actual values, not flags that indicate what
>>kind of bound it is.
>
>did i implement it smarter then or what?
>i used 2 bits in total. 'upperbound, lowerbound, truebound'.
>the search result is based upon a single bound. So it IS the same,
>it IS higher or it IS lower.
>
>What am i missing here?

i'm doing the same. but in plaat's papers, he suggests you store both an upper
bound, and a lower bound. the idea seems to be that since MTD potentially
produces lots of researches, you could maybe use the additional information. at
least that's what i think it's supposed to be.
as an example, take a position somewhere in your search tree with true value 15.
you do your first test with 0. you get e.g. lowerbound(p)=13. then you try 20.
you get e.g. upperbound(p)=18.
now, if your third test is for +10, and you get to this position again, you get
a HT cutoff because of lowerbound(p)=13. the way you and i implemented it, we
would only have the information upperbound(p)=18 in our table. which would give
you no cutoff here. that's what i think this is about.
however, there was this discussion about MTD always approaching the score from
the same side. like that the sequence of tests i described 0,20,10 is not
possible for certain MTD implementations. then you don't need to store 2 values,
as bob pointed out.

aloha
  martin



>>--
>>GCP



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