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Subject: Re: Towards a causality facility

Author: Joachim Rang

Date: 06:49:53 09/18/03

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On September 18, 2003 at 09:25:08, Steven Edwards wrote:

>On September 18, 2003 at 04:57:02, Peter Fendrich wrote:
>>On September 18, 2003 at 04:18:35, Steven Edwards wrote:
>
>>>The programs Kaissa, Caps, and Paradise all had a causality facility.  Such a
>>>feature is used for forward pruning in a manner suggestive of the human move
>>>selection process.  The basic idea is:
>>>
>>>Given a subtree search of a position P with move M1 from P, the causality
>>>facility produces a causal data structure that contains the various constraints
>>>on the position and the move that allow the evaluation returned from the
>>>subsearch to be valid.  Forward pruning is achieved when a move M2, a sibling of
>>>M1, can be applied to the causal data structure with the result that M2 doesn't
>>>violate any of the constraints and so doesn't need to be searched.
>>>
>>>It's not an easy problem, and some solutions may require more resources to
>>>calculate and probe the causal data than to do the unpruned search.
>>>
>>>Are there any current programs that have a causality facility?
>
>>During the search of M1 the program collects some values=constraints and builds
>>up a causal data strucuture. That structure is used during the search of M2-Mx
>>(siblings of M1). Right?
>
>Yes.
>
>>What kind of constraint values could that be?
>>How does that form a data structure?
>>
>>Do you have some example values...
>
>D] rnb1kbnr/ppp1pppp/8/3q4/8/2N5/PPPP1PPP/R1BQKBNR b KQkq - 1 3
>
>A program is playing Black with the above root position as position "P".  The
>first move on the list, M1, is a6.  The search tries this and gets a poor score
>and a causal data structure.  The program applies the next move M2 on the list,
>a5, to the data structure and sees that the constraints that produced the bad
>score for M1 also produce a simisar score for M2, so M2 is not searched.
>
>Some of the constraints in this case:
>
>1. The wN/c3 remains there, unpinned, and able to capture bQ/d5
>
>2. The bQ/d5 remains there and is undefended
>
>3. Black has no known counterattacks or other resources within the depth of the
>subtree search.


I think with a killer-slot for move-ordering all moves which left the black
queen on d5 will be dismissed very soon. No need for a causility facility.

I think Rebel does some interesting form of forward pruning based on
evaluatuion. It seems to me, that this is comparable to your approach.

I also made a post concerning forward pruning based on evaluation, which you can
find here:

http://www.chess-archive.com/ccc.php?art_id=306821

regards Joachim



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