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

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 09:00:34 01/29/04

Go up one level in this thread


On January 29, 2004 at 10:26:48, Tony Werten wrote:

>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
>

Yes.  I don't like the term "null-window" as that then gets confused with
null-move search which is yet _another_ animal.  :)

Our CC vocabulary is a bit byzantine at times...



>>
>>
>>>
>>>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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