Author: Mike Siler
Date: 15:32:42 09/09/03
Go up one level in this thread
On September 09, 2003 at 10:21:02, Russell Reagan wrote: >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. That logic is great when you just look at searching to depth x and x+1. During a game though, there could be many places where the program runs out of time with only a few tens of thousands of nodes left to search. A small increase in NPS would allow the program to go a ply deeper in these situations. Of course, there will probably be few of these situations in each game, but an occassional extra ply of searching is undoubtedly helpful. Michael
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