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Subject: Re: Why bother with NPS??

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 07:21:02 09/09/03

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On September 09, 2003 at 09:01:57, Arshad Syed wrote:

>I read in a post here that tweaking NPS a bit here and there wouldn't really
>matter since the node depth wouldn't increase with a marginal increase in NPS.
>The NPS would have to drastically increase in order to increase the depth by a
>level, at depths > 6.
>
>Please give me your opinion on this, since I don't want to be tweaking code
>unnecessarily, especially if it is not going to make a difference.
>
>Thanks,
>Arshad

Even the best chess programs have an effective branching factor of more than 2,
and probably closer to 3. That means that you would have to double your NPS in
order to get one ply deeper, and that is assuming that you have an EBF of 2
(which you probably don't). I don't know how high the EBF of most amateur
programs are, but even if it was 4 (probably pretty good for an amateur), that
means you have to speed up your program to 4 times faster than it currently is
to get one more ply of search in the same amount of time. That's very unlikely,
and probably not worth the work, because there are other methods to search
deeper, such as improving move ordering, transposition table, forward pruning,
and so on.



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