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Subject: Re: Q: Singular extensions

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 13:24:07 01/06/04

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On January 06, 2004 at 14:58:38, Anthony Cozzie wrote:

>On January 06, 2004 at 14:32:58, Slater Wold wrote:
>
>>On January 05, 2004 at 08:48:23, José Carlos wrote:
>>
>>>  Hi, I'd like to try singular extensions in my program. I've been trying to
>>>think about it and all my tries so far result in worse performance. After some
>>>web search I haven't been able to find anything but the general idea described.
>>>  Is there any good description somewhere? Some pseudo-code? I guess there must
>>>be something interesting in the archives but I can't download all of them.
>>>  Thanks in advance,
>>>
>>>  José C.
>>
>>SE and nullmove do not mix.  And that's straight from Hsu.  From speaking with
>>him (via e-mail), I gathered that this would be his approach using nullmove, and
>>I tried it in Crafty with very nominal success:
>
>they seem to work just fine in Ferret, arguably the strongest tactical program
>out there.
>
>anthony

Yes, but Ferret is not using Hsu's Singular Extension algorithm.  not even
close.  Bruce is using a "SE approximation" that works very well, but it is
not to be confused with what Hsu defined as singular extensions.

I did the full DB implementation in Cray Blitz, and using non-recursive
null-move R=1, it seemed to work pretty well.  I have tried it more than
once in Crafty, and it simply did not work reasonably whatever I tried.  I've
not decided that it is hopeless, but I have not played with it further in at
least a couple of years now...  I came to the same conclusion that somehow,
null-move with bigger R values simply doesn't work very well.  You extend, but
null-move reduces the depth and things get lost in the middle.




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