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Subject: Re: Question about "The meaning of Alpha and Beta" by Dr. Hyatt

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 20:44:29 01/28/04

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On January 28, 2004 at 23:27:03, Russell Reagan wrote:

>On January 28, 2004 at 22:50:05, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>Bruce's case is a pathological problem that will happen.  But it is caused by an
>>extreme happening.  In a normal search this won't/can't happen (assuming you are
>>not using null-move).  But in reality it can.  However, 99.9% of the time,
>>re-searching with beta,+infinity after a fail high on alpha,beta will produce a
>>score as expected...
>
>Okay, let me see if I understand what's going on.
>
>In your newsgroup post, you were speaking from a theoretical point of view,
>while Bruce was speaking from a practical view where search instability has
>already crept in (via null-move, or whatever).
>
>As long as you're doing pure alpha-beta with aspiration search, it is safe to
>assume that the real score of a failed aspiration search will be (-infinity,
>alpha+1) for a fail low, and (beta-1, +infinity) for a fail high.

No.  If you eliminate the transposition table, this is guaranteed to be true,
but with the transposition table, a potential fail-high followed by a fail-low
situation can occur at any time.

>
>This kind of search instability problem is introduced by the same position being
>handled differently at different parts of the tree due to their different paths
>(ex. use of a transposition table, null-move or any forward pruning done based
>upon alpha or beta, 3-fold-repetition, 50 move rule, etc.).
>
>Is that all correct?



That is correct, yes...



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