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Subject: Re: Penalty for Display of Alternate Moves = ?

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 00:02:10 12/04/02

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On December 02, 2002 at 22:33:14, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On December 02, 2002 at 18:01:00, Bob Durrett wrote:
>
>>
>>Fritz will display second best, third best, etc. moves and give a line for each.
>> But the Fritz manual says doing so requires extra computation when compared to
>>calculating only one move and displaying a line for it.
>>
>>I do not know what other chess-playing programs have to offer insofar as display
>>of alternate moves with there lines is concerned.
>>
>>A few questions:
>>
>>(1) If other programs offer this same feature, how do these chess engines
>>produce the alternate moves and lines? Differently from the way the first move
>>and it's line is produced?
>
>There are two ways to do this.
>
>1.  Search all legal moves and get the best and display it.  Delete this from
>the list of legal movs and search again for the best.  This will take about
>as long as the first search.  Total cost to find two moves is 2x the cost.
>
>2.  search the first move and get the PV.  Then as you search others, you may
>get a new PV.  This PV is clearly the best, and the old best is now _Probably_
>second-best.
>
>To do it right is expensive.
>
>>
>>(2) If a chess-playing program were optimized to display multiple lines, would
>>the search algorithms and position evaluation code be any different from those
>>of a chess engine optimized for one move [and it's line] only?
>
>Probably not.  But alpha/beta is not designed to produce anything other than
>the "bst" move...
>
>
>
>>
>>(3) If an engine is not optimized for this application, how much will the engine
>>performance be handicapped if it is forced to display alternate moves and their
>>lines?
>
>
>
>5 lines is roughly 5x slower, but it can be better or worse...

For XiniX, getting the exact scores of all moves is only about 30% slower. It
seems that being able to order the moves at the root on score helps the tree a
lot. Plus there are a lot more exact scores from hashtable to cutoff ( I think )

I have been thinking about this since it might be worth taking this 30% hit, but
have an easy multiprocessor algorithm; just splitting at the root.

Ignoring the memorybandwith, this algorithm should be able to produce a nearly
linear speedup ( Again, I think )

Tony

>
>
>
>
>
>>
>>There may not be any simple answers to these questions?  : (
>>
>>My motive for asking these questions is obtain preliminary information which I
>>might use for an idea, having to do with trees of "best move sequences," I would
>>like to think more about.
>>
>>Bob D.



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