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Subject: Re: Pondering ("think on opponent's time")

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 23:06:21 11/11/02

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On November 12, 2002 at 01:14:36, Uri Blass wrote:

>If we evaluate every possible move by having a thread for every legal move
>then we have an idea about the second best move.

Starting a thread for every legal move serves no purpose. Either you are going
to set them all to the same priority, and you will be searching (say) 35 moves
for 1/35th of the time you are pondering. Basically you're doing a search with
no pruning at the root. So you're doing exactly what the opponent is doing, only
you will never see what he sees because you're not pruning away moves at the
root. When the opponent moves, you will have only searched the "right" move
1/35th of the time. So if the opponent takes 3 minutes to move, you only
pondered on the "right" move for a little over 5 seconds. In a lot of positions
there will be a lot more than 35 legal moves, and that number of seconds keeps
dropping. Basically you just wasted that 3 minutes.

If you set the threads with one to run at a higher priority than the others, the
one that you set with a higher priority is going to dominate all of the other
threads since it will always be searching, so you might as well have just
pondered on that one move, because not a single one of the other threads are
going to result in anything useful.

Russell



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