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Subject: Re: Forward pruning and some related techniques

Author: Peter Fendrich

Date: 14:18:24 03/02/04

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On March 02, 2004 at 09:51:33, Uri Blass wrote:

>On March 02, 2004 at 09:04:13, Peter Fendrich wrote:
>
>>On March 02, 2004 at 08:07:57, Sergei S. Markoff wrote:
>>
>>>Hello all!
>>>
>>>I post an answer to Cristophe's posting, but it was too close to message list's
>>>end.
>>>
>>>>An idea I have played with, and which worked somehow in the 16 bits version of
>>>>Chess Tiger is to:
>>>
>>>I'm using in SmarThink a scheme like you described but with some differences.
>>>I'm searching some first moves, captures and extended moves to full depth. Other
>>>moves I'm searching with reduced depth (the reducing amount depends of several
>>>factors, for example if the opponent king safety is worse and it's a move that
>>>going piece closer to opponent's king then reducing amount will be less e.t.c.,
>>>I'm using here a lot of knowledge including trajectories analysis e.t.c.). If
>>>the reduced search returns value > alpha, I'm researching this move to full
>>>depth. There are a lot of possibilities to include a lot of knowledge here to
>>>build really knowledge-guided tree.
>>
>>Hi Sergei,
>>
>>I've tried similar things in Terra with no success at all and the key here is,
>>as you point out, knowledge. My program is currently not structured for carrying
>>a lot of knowledge in the interior nodes and that's of course why these things
>>didn't work so well. I have only kept a few features. For instance reducing the
>>depth for moves down in the move list that never (seldom) caused Fail High.
>>(Kind of "reversed" History killer table). It seems to improve the program a
>>tiny bit but not much...
>>
>>/Peter
>
>This is the only similiar pruning that I have in movei for more than a year(even
>0.0799 is using that pruning).
>
>I believe that this is the pruning that sergei talked about in the past when he
>talked about history based pruning(I implemented it independetly in movei before
>he talked about it and was disappointed when he talked about it because I
>understood that it means losing one relative advantage that movei has relative
>to most programs and as an inferior programmer without some relative advantages
>thanks to ideas I have no chance to compete).
>
>I believe that the main problem is to write the relevant functions to calculate
>the relevant knowledge.
>
>My experience with history based pruning was that it clearly helped in test
>suites(I was less sure about games but I decided to keep it and later made some
>exceptions when not to use history based pruning).
>
>Uri


I've lots of ideas around these concepts but it doesn't suit the basic structure
of Terra very well. That's one of the reasons why I'm sketching on a completely
new engine. One other reason is that I'm kind of bored of the pure bitboard
technique these days... A combination of bitboards and a 0x88 version is the
optimal IMHO.
/Peter




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