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Subject: Re: Opinions requested -- what to do when qsearch ends in checkmate...

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 07:52:41 07/25/03

Go up one level in this thread


On July 25, 2003 at 10:31:20, José Carlos wrote:

>On July 25, 2003 at 08:10:47, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On July 25, 2003 at 04:34:35, Amir Ban wrote:
>>
>>>On July 25, 2003 at 02:41:22, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>>
>>>>Now, a qsearch ending in checkmate may or may not really be a checkmate. After
>>>>all, we only tried certain moves and it could very well be that the checkmate
>>>>could be avoided.
>>>>
>>>>So, the burning question is...
>>>>What should we do when the qsearch ends in a mate?
>>>>There are lots of alternatives, from the primitive "return a mate" to "send a
>>>>danger signal up the tree and let the regular search deal with it" to
>>>>"extending" to...
>>>>
>>>>What is your favorite choice and why?
>>>
>>>I don't see where opinion comes in. In a node where all legal moves are not
>>>considered static eval is the minimum.
>>>
>>>Amir
>>
>>I think that it is not so simple.
>>
>>Suppose you find in the qsearch that all captures are losing because of
>>checkmate.
>
>  You miss the point. It's not that all captures lead to checkmate, it's that
>you don't detect checkmates.

There are programs that detect checkmate in the qsearch.

 Particularly, Amir was talking about a position
>with no captures out of check. If you don't try all legal moves, you don't know
>if you're checkmated.


I assume in this discussion that the program knows that it is checkmated in a
leaf position.

Movei knows for a leaf position if it is a checkmate or not a checkmate.


 You can assume it if you want, but I don't think that the
>probability of capturing the checking piece, or capturing something to go out of
>check, is bigger than 0.50 for all in-check positions, thus you're gonna make
>more than 50% mistakes.
>
>  José C.

I was not talking about a situation when the king is in check and I think that
Dann also was not talking about it because he talked about checkmate.

I will explain it by a diagram
suppose the following position is a position when qsearch is called

[D]r3qrk1/5p1p/7Q/5B2/8/4P3/R4PPP/6K1 b - - 0 1


You analyze Rxa2 Qxh7#

What is the value that you return from qsearch.

You can return the evaluation of the root and you can be more passimistic
because you detect checkmate in the search.

I think that Dann meant to this in the original post because he said in the
original post

"Now, a qsearch ending in checkmate may or may not really be a checkmate."

He did not say
"Now, a qsearch ending in check may or may not really be a checkmate."

Uri



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