Author: martin fierz
Date: 13:10:38 09/12/02
Go up one level in this thread
On September 12, 2002 at 09:28:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>On September 11, 2002 at 22:14:57, martin fierz wrote:
>
>>prompted by the discussion on MTD before, i decided to look once again what my
>>program does.
>>
>>1. observation
>>dann corbit suggested that MTD works "binary-search-like" in zooming in on the
>>true value, in the sense that it converges rapidly. assuming the grain size of
>>my eval to be 1, i have seen ONLY search window changes of 1. like when my eval
>>jumps from 0 to 10
>>
>>(0,1) returns value 1
>>(1,2) returns value 2
>>...
>>(9,10) returns 10
>>(10,11) returns 10.
>>
>>not once did i see it do something like
>>(0,1) returns value 9
>>
>>i forget which is which, fail-soft/fail-hard, but i'm using the one which
>>returns the maximum of the successors, not the one which returns beta. so in
>>theory (0,1) could return 9, but it never does. i guess that's not really
>>surprising, since alpha-beta just tries to do as little work as possible :-)
>>
>>2. question
>>my question is related to bob's "bouncing over". MTD necessarily has to bounce
>>over once, as in the example above, it has to search both (9,10) and (10,11),
>>and fail high on the first search, and fail low on the second. so the question
>>is: isn't this bouncing over too? and if this is really bad, then: has anybody
>>ever measured the difference between MTD storing just one bound in the hashtable
>>with storing both bounds?
>
>
>The gotcha is to use fail-soft. And this probably requires a few changes
>to how you back up scores. IE you might do something like this:
>
> v=Search(-beta, -alpha, etc);
> if (v > alpha) {
> if (v > beta) return beta;
> alpha=v;
> }
>
>That return beta is not fail-soft. it should be changed to
>
> if (v > beta) return v;
>
>And you have to do that everywhere. Doing so should get you a value
>back to the root that is outside the normal X,X+1 window you search
>with mtd(f).
>
>Note that lazy eval exits need to behave in the same way, returning the
>best estimate of the score they can, not just simply alpha or beta.
>
i am using fail-soft. as i wrote in my post, i just didn't know what you guys
call it, but i'm using the one which returns max(child values), not beta. and
just like dieter suggests in his post, i start out with
bestvalue = -mate;
for all moves do
{
value = -search(-beta,-alpha,etc);
bestvalue = max(value, bestvalue);
if(value>beta)
break;
}
return bestvalue;
is there anything wrong with this?
aloha
martin
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.