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

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 23:48:19 11/11/02

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On November 11, 2002 at 17:39:50, Uri Blass wrote:
>>If we assume x is 50 like Bob's example, the first part of you equation would be
>>A% times 50% times 90% CPU, looks like that will be hard pressed to compete
>>against Bob's 50% times 100% CPU. Of course the assumption is that A=100, so you
>>only have 10% CPU to burn on the remaining 50% of the moves. You need 50%
>>efficiency out of those 10% to compete with Bob, and you have only moves that
>>failed low to search, I'd almost say that is impossible.
>>
>>-S.
>
>1)I assumed that x is 60% in my example.

So we agree, there is one move with 60% probability of being
the best, and all the remaining moves cannot sum to more than 40%, for
a total of 100% of course.

>2)I do not understand what you say here.

I don't blame you, it wasn't very elegantly put.
Hopefully this time I've made myself understandable :)

>I will explain again what you can practically
>do in your search:
>
>You can start with 90% time for the expected move
>and 10% for the rest of the moves with possibility to
>change it based on the evaluation(if you find
>during the search that the move that you expect
>is a bad move you can give more time
>for other moves and you can also give more time
>for other moves if you find that the score
>of other moves is the same as the score of the move that
>you expect.

Yes you can, but you then get 90 efficiency on the 60% expected move,
that's 0.6*0.9+(something), this (something) must be something less than 40
times the 10% that remains, right?
So 0.6*0.9+0.4*0.1=0.54+0.04=0.58 which it less than Bob's 0.6*1.0=0.6.
Further more it is an upper limit that assumes you are always able to pick the
correct second move, most probably you won't be 100% correct here, let's say you
are only right half the time (or equivalently: that you distribute the remaining
10% CPU power over more than 1 move), that comes to:
0.6*0.9+0.4*0.1*0.5=0.56 which is even less, but also more realistic.

The only move that can give you 60% return on invested CPU power is the PV move,
therefore pondering that is the most effective.

What to do when we _don't_ have a pv-move is a completely different question
(type B moves).

I guess it is also possible that one might "detect" when the PV-move is among
those 40% misses, and thus effectively increase CPU returns, I think this is
really what you are talking about. However I don't think I would waste any power
(even 10%) on searching other moves until there is some indication the PV-move
is a bad choice.

>The total result may be 90% time for the
>expected move when your pv includes the best move
>and only average of 40% of your time for
>the expected move in other cases
>so you can practically get 30% of your time for
>the played move that is different than the expected move.

Maybe we misunderstand each other, you seem to be mixing in the type B moves in
the calculation, I think that is rather confusing since we don't know the
percentage of A versus B moves.

-S.
>Uri



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