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Subject: Re: Evaluation-based Reductions and/or Extensions

Author: Andrew Williams

Date: 13:25:37 12/29/03

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On December 29, 2003 at 09:27:54, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On December 28, 2003 at 20:56:06, Tom Likens wrote:
>
>>I'll give it a shot.  Essentially, what I've been experimenting with is
>>aggressively reducing and/or pruning various branches of the tree depending
>>on the current evaluation of the position and the previous level evaluation.
>>If things don't seem to be improving (or getting worse) then I either...
>>
>>1) reduce the depth the branch is searched or
>>2) eliminate it altogether.
>>
>>So far I've restricted this rather severely to positions where neither king
>>is in check, no other extensions have been triggered, the last move played was
>>not a null move, non-winning captures, non-hanging pieces etc.
>
>You may also find it effective to be conservative about pruning and reductions
>at nodes where there has been an extension in one of the last three or four
>plies of the path leading to the position.  The disadvantage of doing this is,
>of course, that the path-dependency of the search decisions becomes
>even bigger.
>
>>One of the problems I've identified is that two identical positions may
>>not be pruned/reduced in exactly the same way, if their parent scores differ.
>>Storing the score for these nodes in the hash table is potential trouble,
>>since transpositions may have different scores.
>>
>>Uri's idea of only using these nodes for move ordering may do the trick but
>>I haven't really evaluated it yet.  More than likely in the next day or two,
>>I'll add some scaffolding to my code to catch these type of nodes and gather
>>some statistics.  Right now it's mostly guesswork.
>
>A technique I have found useful during development is the following:
>
>Instead of actually doing any forward pruning or reductions, set a local
>variable
>that says "I would have pruned this move if forward pruning was enabled".  If it
>turns out that the move fails high, print the position and the move to a log
>file.
>By studying the log file, you can identify cases which your pruning techniques
>fail to understand, and use this information to improve the accuracy of your
>pruning.
>
>Tord

I do this a LOT.

Andrew



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