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Subject: Re: One-reply extension howto

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 21:49:38 03/08/03

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On March 06, 2003 at 08:27:26, Georg v. Zimmermann wrote:

>
>>
>>I don't see any reason to extend a move I fail high on, unless there is a threat
>>further down.

The problem is that often you have _one_ good move.  All others fail low,
and this _one_ move seems to be good enough and fails high.  But if you
go deeper, you see it fail also and don't make a mistake.  Hence the point
for singular-extensions.  When you have lots of good moves, if you discover
one is bad, that's ok, you have plenty of others.  But once you know there
is only _one_ good move, it had _better_ be good or the entire path gets
mis-evaluated.


>
>What you describe happens ALL the time.
>
>>In that case I would prefer a heuristic that extends on threats
>>directly.
>
>For that heuristic to work, you will have to see that its a threat. Often you
>will have looked deep enough for the singular extensions to kick in, but without
>seeing the threat.
>
>>Extending singular moves like PxQ where there is no threat involved is a waste
>>of time as far as I can tell.

You can avoide such extensions pretty easily.  IE gross winning captures don't
need to be extended most of the time.  Ditto for recaptures.


>
>In the case of 1.e4 e5 2.Qh5 d6 3. Qxe5 //dxe5// : agreed.
>But how about 1. e4 e5 2. Qf3 Qf6 3.Qxf6 //gxf6// ?
>
>To distinguish between those 2 cases all tactically strong engines I know of use
>extensions depending on bounds (alpha/beta).
>
>Georg

using bounds introduces yet another set of problems.  change the bound, you
change the extensions that trigger, and you see fail highs followed by fail
lows on the re-search, etc.





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