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

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 07:26:48 01/29/04

Go up one level in this thread


On January 29, 2004 at 10:21:11, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 29, 2004 at 05:09:30, Tony Werten wrote:
>
>>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 ?
>
>Different animals.
>
>If I fail high on the aspiration window at the root, I _know_ that is a valid
>fail-high.  And I _always_ accept that as the best move no matter _what_ happens
>on the re-search.
>
>If I fail high on the PVS null-window search at the root, it is common to
>immediately fail low on the re-search using the original aspiration window.  I
>ignore that fail high completely as it is often false and caused by a null-move
>search failure somewhere below that node.
>
>I am not quite sure I understood your comment above, however, so maybe I missed
>your point "don't accept at root so why accept inside the tree?".....

You might understand it when I tell you that I confused aspiration window with
null window :)

Tony

>
>
>>
>>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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