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Subject: Re: Why it should be worth to obtain N-best-trees!

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 08:04:57 12/05/02

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On December 05, 2002 at 10:50:47, Ingo Lindam wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>quoting myself I would like to start a new discussion about why I think its
>worth two obtain N-best-trees (as a result of the search process), containing
>the N-best moves in each exactly evaluated node of the search tree.
>
>Robert Hyatt agreed that the effort to do this should be able to estimate by
>getting N*N times slower. This means 4 times slower to obtain a 2-best-tree
>instead of just obtaining a single PV:

Nonsense:

At iteration 0 do a full width search for all moves and you get a score back for
all moves.

Then do an aspiration search for the first 2 moves. Decide wich is best and
2ndbest. Then search the remaining moves with (2ndbest,2ndbest+1) If a move
fails high research it and decide new 2ndbest score.

No way this will slow you down factor 4.

Tony

>
>Ofcourse I am aware of winning nothing and just loosing a lot of time when
>I play games and my aim is just to obtain the best move according to one given
>evaluation function (at the end of the quote I hint on the possibility to use
>the N-best-tree for rescoring on basis of a second, improved evaluation function
>that is more complex and therefor just usable on a reduced search space/tree).
>
>"
>BUT...
>I think engines can do more than this (if we allow them to do so). They can
>analyse and give a tree to argue for their decission by giving a scored tree,
>rather than a single variation.
>
>And also the developer will save so much time (yes, SAVE time) by doing this
>(not when playing a game) but when testing and developing.
>
>Give the engine a lot of time to analyse some crucial/test positions, store the
>tree and than enjoy the speedup when testing several evaluation methods on this
>reduced search tree.
>
>And when you agree that doing a N-best search slows down not exponentially, but
>going deeper into the searchtree does. Then there must be a certain limit for
>going deeper. And when you have no time to go deeper, why not use a better, more
>complex evaluation function on the N-best tree in that time.
>
>Even more when you think of...
>
>a) N is const.!: so = O(N*N * x^ply) = O(c * x^ply) keeps O(x^ply) in O(ply)
>notation
>b) rescoring on the N-best tree can given without any problems to another
>processor or even maschine.
>c) even generating the N+1-best-tree given a N-best-tree can done by an
>additional maschine for ply K as soon as N-best tree for play K.
>d) generation the N+1-best-tree (i the MP case) can be accellerated by giving
>the hash of generating the N-best tree.
>
>Do I miss something?"
>
>Internette Gruesse,
>Ingo



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