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

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 02:09:30 01/29/04

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On January 28, 2004 at 22:50:05, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>
>Both are right.
>
>Technically, what happens is that it is possible for you to do a very deep
>search at the root, say when pondering, and you store a hash table entry for
>position "P" that says score >= .60, depth=15.  Now after that long ponder, your
>opponent plays a different move.  Each time you hit position P, you can use that
>>= .60 score because of the extreme draft stored in the table.  And if your
>current beta value is (say) .3, then you will fail high since the table entry
>says >= .6.  But when you relax beta, and re-search, now when you hit table
>entry P, you get sufficient draft, but the flag says "LOWER" which means that
>the .6 value stored is the LOWER bound.  That is useless here since our UPPER
>bound (beta) is +infinity.  You can't use it.  And you are not searching deep
>enough to see the reason for the fail high, so now you fail low.
>
>That won't cause a problem if you implement it correctly, and the fail high _is_
>the correct result for the best move.  But you have to take care that the
>fail-low doesn't cause a re-search when you fail high again.  And you have to be
>sure that you realize that after the fail-high, _that_ is the move you want to
>play even if it fails low on the re-search.

Really ? I think I disagree. When this happens at the root you don't accept the
failhigh score, so why would you inside the tree ?

Tony

>
>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...



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