Author: Mike Hood
Date: 08:09:34 11/10/03
Go up one level in this thread
On November 10, 2003 at 09:31:50, Bob Durrett wrote: >On November 10, 2003 at 05:00:20, José Carlos wrote: > >>On November 10, 2003 at 04:44:10, Jouni Uski wrote: >> >>>Hard for Ruffian (P4 2,4 GHz), not found in 20 minutes, BUT after executing >>>move sees very fast, that white is mated! Null move problem? >>> >>>Jouni >> >> I don't know for Ruffian, but I guess it's the same reason than for my >>program: in the initial position, the program must search a lot of moves of >>queen and rook, so it takes a while to search deep enough, but if you take the >>rook, gxf3 is forced and then there's a pawn ending, where it's much faster to >>search very deep. >> My program Anubis finds it in ply 22 after forcing Qxf3, very quicky, but from >>the initial position, after some minutes, it's still in depth 16, so it will >>take a long time to get the needed 23 plies (probably less due to extensions, >>maybe like 20 or 21). >> >> José C. > >Since chess engines in general are supposed to be weak at finding sacrificial >lines, perhaps the programmers should do something to minimize the problem. In >this case, having the sacrifice looked at first might have saved some time. > >Bob D. The main problem with this idea is that sacrifices are normally bad, rarely good; and if a sacrifice IS good, a deep search is needed to find the benefits. So a lot of computational time will be spent on searching for something that in 99.9% of positions isn't there. The only alternative would be a revolutionary AI algorithm. I always try to think of a chess program that uses similar thought processes to myself. When I'm in the chess club I only consider sacrifices when I'm desperate, ie when my position is so bad that I think something like "I'm pinned in... I'm gonna lose... so I'll swap my Rook for two Pawns and get some momentum back into the game". I'm not saying a chess program should have a "desperation algorithm", I'm just saying that in some special circumstances it might search in ways it wouldn't usually. But I admit that I'm just thinking aloud. Feel free to discard my ideas as idealistic nonsense :)
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