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Subject: Re: The King's News Clothes (Re: DB vs)

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:38:17 11/23/98

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On November 23, 1998 at 17:49:30, Amir Ban wrote:

>On November 23, 1998 at 17:14:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On November 23, 1998 at 11:50:01, Amir Ban wrote:
>>
>>>On November 23, 1998 at 09:37:25, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>On November 22, 1998 at 11:49:54, blass uri wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>I did not ask for all the tree but only the tree up to the point that my
>>>>>programs can see by search of 3 minutes that black has at least 1 pawn
>>>>>advantage.
>>>>>
>>>>>This is clearly less positions
>>>>>because if in the leaves it is -2.xx then Junior can see some moves before the
>>>>>leaves that it is -1.xx
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>ok... rather than 10 million pages, it might only be 1 million pages.  How
>>>>would we get those to you?  :)
>>>>
>>>
>>>I wonder how many people reading the last few posts of this thread have been
>>>reminded of the story of the King's New Clothes.
>>>
>>>
>>>>what you are overlooking is the point that junior (and all the other programs)
>>>>look at a fat, shallow tree.
>>>
>>>I am quite sure that the opposite is true. All PC programs have a much smaller
>>>effective branching factor than DT/DB. This is because they all do forward
>>>pruning, many of them aggressively, while DT/DB did none, and they do
>>>extensions, most at least as much as DT/DB, and at least in Junior, much more
>>>aggressively than DT/DB.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>I'm going to try to keep this simple.  Here is a point-blank question:  if you
>>really believe that nonsensical statement you wrote above, then how can you
>>reconcile that with a program that is searching at least 1,000 times faster
>>than you, yet only gets to depth 10-11 in the game?  If they are not extending
>>far more than you could ever hope to then exactly *what* are they doing with
>>that factor of 1,000?  And remember that they have a pretty simple quiescence
>>search and they toss out bummer captures as well, so the work is *not* in
>>looking at zillions of captures.
>>
>>now, in light of that, if you believe that "you extend much more aggressively
>>than they do" then *where* are those nodes of theirs *going*???  You have a
>>printout to look at.  Ought to be able to answer that somehow...
>>
>
>I answered this in the first paragraph you snipped.
>
>Instructions to the reader: To get the simple answer to Bob's simple question,
>go up two posts, and look at the question and answer that followed the one
>above.
>
>
>>
>>And then we will return to the definition of "hyperbole"...
>
>Amir


I'll play that game.  we are talking about a factor of 1,000.  You implied
this could easily be explained by their not doing null-move or other forward-
pruning tricks?  That is your explanation?

I'd like to suggest you break out the calculator.  Null move does *not*
reduce the search by a factor of 1,000.  Not by a factor of 100.  Generally
not by a factor of 10.  So, I re-ask...  if they are only searching to 10
plies, *why* does it take them so many nodes to get to ply=10.  Want some
math?  perfect tree ought to be 2*38^5 moves.  They search that many nodes in
under 1 second (that is about 160M nodes).  Most agree that current programs
search within a factor of two of the optimal tree size (references available
if needed).  so lets say they can fully search this tree in 1 second, even
assuming imperfect ordering...   Now, again, I'd like to ask the
*same* question again, and this time get a *reasonable* answer:



If they take (say) 5 minutes to do a 10 ply search, at 250M+ nodes per second,
that is over 300X the number of nodes a full-width search to depth=10 should
search.  If you factor in a q-search that is the same size as the full-width
part, we have a missing factor of 150 to account for.  I say that is *all*
search extensions.  And I say that is *far* more than any of the rest of us do
in terms of extensions.  How *else* would you characterize this?

Hint to the reader:  previous answer was based on "air".  and wasn't acceptable.
Question was *not* answered as implied...



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