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Subject: Re: Iterative Deepening

Author: Don Dailey

Date: 18:22:02 09/21/98

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On September 20, 1998 at 19:31:36, John Coffey wrote:

>We all know that searching 1 ply, 2ply, 3ply, 4ply etc produces faster
>results than just searching 4 ply by itself because the move odering
>improves the efficiency of the alpha-beta pruning.
>
>But ...
>
>Has this approach ever been used above the base of the tree?  i.e. If
>I am doing a seven ply search and I make the first move for white and
>I am searching the black responses, at this point would it pay to do
>a 1ply, 2ply, 3ply, 4ply, 5 ply, and finally a 6 ply search?
>
>If so, then the number of sub-searches would get quite high.
>
>John Coffey

So what you are talking about is called rercursive iterative
deepening.  It was used in a program called star-tech which
I did not write.  If you have good move ordering heuristics,
this probably does not pay off.  I have a tiny piece of code
in my program that simply does a reduced depth search if a
hash table suggestion is not available, just to get a  best
move.  It is a tiny improvement in most positions, occasionally
a respectable one.

Most of these ideas are minor refinements.  I think every chess
programmers is looking for that one line code change that will
add 100 rating points!  I doubt it exists (unless it is a
bug fix!)

- Don



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