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Subject: Re: Move ordering ?

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 09:26:55 10/21/98

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On October 21, 1998 at 10:54:16, James T. Walker wrote:

>If I understood a previous thread, Dr. Hyatt indicated that there is effectively
>no move ordering done by most programs(At least Crafty)?  Can anyone please
>answer this for me??  It seems unreal that there would be no attempt to order
>the moves so that the most promising moves were searched first.

Chess programs try very hard to search the best move first in any position.  If
you do this, it doesn't matter much, if at all, in what order you search the
rest of the moves.  In practice though, you make mistakes, so even if you think
you've searched the best move already, you still want to try to search the rest
of the moves in best-first order.

This is actually a large component of what chess programmers try to do.

I don't know where you got the idea that Crafty isn't doing any move ordering.
Perhaps you misunderstood when Bob said something to the effect that Crafty
can't tell you what the second best move in a position is.  If you search the
best move first, and do a classic alpha-beta search, all you know is that the
best one is the best, and the rest of them are worse.  You don't know for sure
that the second one you searched is any better than the twelfth.

bruce



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