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Subject: Re: longest fail low ever?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 06:56:26 12/15/03

Go up one level in this thread


On December 15, 2003 at 06:49:04, José Carlos wrote:

>>>>I have seen worse.  What happens is that the aspiration window initially cuts
>>>>off all mate scores.  But once it fails low, it can't just find any old mate
>>>>and cut off analyzing that line.  Now it has to follow _all_ mates and that
>>>>kills performance.  This also happens in endgames where you can potentially
>>>>promote a pawn, but it always gets lost, so you can search to great depth.
>>>>And eventually you find that you can promote it there, but now all those lines
>>>>you got cutoffs on before (where the pawn promoted, but it wasn't forced) now
>>>>explode and while the depth 25 search took 10 seconds, the depth 26 search might
>>>>not take 10 days...
>>>>
>>>>It's a known problem with no known solution.
>>>>
>>>>Even not using aspiration search won't solve it.
>>>
>>>You can not lower the window to -INF, but rather on the initial fail low move it
>>>down -1, then next do -3, and so on.  Or just do it for fail-high and that
>>>should affect fail-low also (since a fail-low on one side is a fail-high for the
>>>other).
>>
>>
>>Yes you can.  We documented that in "using time wisely" and "using time wisely,
>>revisited" which were published in the JICCA.  But it only solves it for
>>some cases, not the pawn promotion case.  Because you _must_ drop it low enough
>>to let the promotion stand, and that is low enough to let _all_ promotions
>>stand, which blows the search right out of reality.
>
>  Some time ago I read an idea I completely forgot to try later. It was about
>starting the search again from iteration 1 when a fail low occurs at high depth,
>so that new ordering information (plus actual hash info) could hopefully help in
>finding a better move faster. Does this idea actually work? (yes, I know, I
>should try it myself, but I can't until next weekend).
>
>  José C.


It can work.  And it can work pretty well.  The problem is that if you are not
careful, and a key hash entry gets overwritten, then the new search may well
find the old best move.  It is possible that this will result in a loop...



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