Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 06:51:13 11/02/03
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> I hold up the chess truth that more depth will > always be advantageous. ^^^^^^ Problems with "always": 1. That depends on what is being traded off for the depth gain. If the quality of the final evaluation is sacrificed too much, the strength may decrease when you raise depth and evaluate more poorly. E.g. Hiarcs often plays better at depth 1 (i.e. it plays with pure high quality root evaluator) than many other programs with depth 3-4. So if Hiarcs were to drop its quality of evaluation to increase the depth to match the depth of the simpler programs, its strength would drop. 2. In addition to evaluation quality/depth trade-ff, merely showing that program changed its mind in 1.2% cases when increasing the depth from 20 to 21 plies, doesn't mean that the new move was stronger in all 1.2% of cases (e.g. just add the percentages to say, depth 5, and you are already to 118%, which means some moves get discarded then picked again at greater depth, hence some depth increases had picked worse choice than their shallower predecessors). 3. It is conceivable that the increase of the "evaluation noise" with greater depth may at some depth _range_ make a particular program play worse than the same program at lower depths. (Obviously, this negative gain range would eventually turn around to positive since the further increase in depth can reach the true, or at least high accuracy, terminal positions in sufficient percentages to offset the increased noise in the remaining cases.)
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