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Subject: Re: pruning vs extensions vs qsearch - are these all effectively the same?

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 10:01:03 11/27/02

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On November 27, 2002 at 11:51:02, Richard Pijl wrote:

>On November 27, 2002 at 11:12:28, David Rasmussen wrote:
>
>>On November 27, 2002 at 10:49:00, Richard Pijl wrote:
>>
>>>On November 27, 2002 at 10:01:02, David Rasmussen wrote:
>>>
>>>>Some time ago, along the lines of these thoughts, I proposed "negative
>>>>extensions". That is, if you can somehow classify a move as "probably not
>>>>interesting", you can "extend" the depth by -1 or -0.75 or whatever seems
>>>>reasonable. Exactly as you do with normal extensions. The good thing about this
>>>>is that nothing gets pruned for good, everything will eventually get searched
>>>>with iterative deepening, but you search what you think is interesting first.
>>>
>>>Isn't this just razoring?
>>>
>>>IIRC Beowulf is using this instead of futility pruning ...
>>>
>>
>>Well, I would say that razoring is a special case of negative extensions.
>>Razoring normally only happens near the frontier nodes. What I am talking about
>>can be applied anywhere in the tree. And also, razoring specifically deals with
>>the futility of getting the score up near alpha again. I am talking about all
>>sorts of "futile" moves. I.e. a move that moves a rook off the only open file,
>>is probably not good. That doesn't mean that we don't want to search this move
>>to some specified depth, in time. But it means that we might put off searching
>>it till later, by "extending" it negatively.
>>
>
>Won't analyzing this kill your search speed? I mean, you will have to apply a
>lot of patterns to really make a difference in decreasing the size of the tree,
>but that will cost performance. And bad moves should have more beta cutoffs in
>the subtree anyway, so the subtree is probably already quite small.

I can only say that I disagree with you.

I do not think that you need a lot of pruning rules to reduce the size of the
tree significantly

You need only good pruning rules.

Uri



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