Author: Uri Blass
Date: 07:03:22 02/15/04
Go up one level in this thread
On February 15, 2004 at 08:53:42, martin fierz wrote: >On February 14, 2004 at 13:16:15, Christophe Theron wrote: > >[snip] > >>What I have always tried to do is to hide the details of what's inside Chess >>Tiger (in order to protect my work a little bit) but still explain what my >>methodology (or work philosophy) was (in order to somehow give back to the >>community). >> >>I think it's important to have strong guidelines in your work. Some of them come >>from your knowledge of information processing in general (be careful not to >>create bugs, don't waste resources, never trust Microsoft...), and some of them >>are specific to the domain of chess programming and took me years to figure out. >>For example: >>* don't compute something in advance if you are not sure you will use it, >>because chances are that you will get a cutoff before you need it (remember it's >>just a guideline - sometimes you can break this rule). >>* you need a very accurate way of measuring progress, or you will not make >>progress at all. >>* Any change can make your program significantly weaker. You need to test your >>changes (with the method you have built) very often. >>* People believe that chess is about evaluation, but actually it's all about >>search (I'm trying very hard to break this rule, because it must be wrong from a >>mathematical point of view, but it's really difficult). > >i'm not sure i agree with this one - but then i don't quite know what you mean >with that sentence :-) >my disagreement comes from the fact that improving your eval automatically >improves your search when you use any kind of pruning which depends on the >evaluation. nullmove is such an example, but this is a general observation which >works for other kinds of pruning decisions like futility pruning too. if you >evaluate better, you have a greater chance of searching/extending important >lines and pruning the irrelevant lines. > >but perhaps you meant something different?! > >cheers > martin I think that christophe meant that based on his experience changes in search rules gave him bigger improvement than changes in evaluation. Uri
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