Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 10:16:46 02/02/04
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On February 02, 2004 at 11:00:08, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On February 02, 2004 at 10:48:10, Tord Romstad wrote: > >>This raises the obvious question: What do Shredder and Hiarcs do to >>achieve the bus pushing effect without having a massive hardware advantage? >>How are they able to outsearch strong and (NPS-wise) much faster programs >>like Crafty? They do forward pruning, of course, but I wish I had a better >>idea of precisely what tricks they use. One of the many reasons I look >>forward to the Palm OS version of Hiarcs is that I will finally have the >>chance to play with the engine myself and see if I can figure out some of >>its secrets. > >I hope you manage. :) As to what they do, I don't know. But I can certainly >say with some authority that it works pretty well. :) But it is more than >search alone. IE Shredder seems to have a significant "feel" for a position as >well. IE in several Crafty games yesterday, someone would fire up shredder to >see what it thought. One such case was where Crafty had +1.0, and Fritz was >saying "0.0". Shredder weighed in with +1.0. And this was all about a >king-side pawn majority in the Crafty-Hiarcs game. Hiarcs fits the same mold, >IMHO. IE it was at about -1.0 at that same point. So doing a good evaluation >_and_ having a good search, is impressive. I think the two are often interrelated. It is easier to do reasonably safe forward pruning with a good evaluation function, IME. >Perhaps one day someone will figure out their "tricks". Or someone else will >develop them again, and avoid the "go commercial" tendency and really produce >some improvements in computer chess overall. The probability that I ever (re)invent something really interesting and effective is very small, but if it happens I will of course not go commercial or keep my findings secret forever. However, it could happen that I will wait a month or two to report about my ideas if I find them shortly before the next CCT. :-) Tord
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