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Subject: Re: Strange PVS results??? Q->Bob Hyatt

Author: Don Dailey

Date: 18:09:47 12/08/98

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On December 08, 1998 at 19:41:45, Will Singleton wrote:

>
>>
>>....  There is a
>>slight enhancement involving the window you use on the re-search
>>but your description is not buggy, and your problem is elsewhere.
>>
>
>What's the slight enhancement?
>
>Will

When the zero width window fails high, the score returned is
actually a lower bound.  Therefore the re-search does not
have to be done with window (alpha, beta) but can be done
with the tighter window, (score_returned_from_fail_hi, beta)

Having said that, you must always take care that lazy evaluation
and any margin crap in your program returns the right assumptions,
or you can get strange behavior.  For instance, if you do lazy
evaluation, let's say your program assumes that the positional
component of the evaluation never can be greater than 1.5 pawns
in either direction.  If you do a material evaluation and can
take a fail hi cutoff based on this assumption (material - 1.5 >= beta)
then the score you must return is material - 1.5, not just material
even though either case is a beta cutoff.   OTHERWISE, this
re-search stuff in the previous paragraph can go wrong.

- Don



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