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Subject: Re: question about ETC

Author: Mridul Muralidharan

Date: 23:14:40 03/22/04

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On March 22, 2004 at 16:55:23, Dieter Buerssner wrote:

>On March 22, 2004 at 12:11:19, Heiner Marxen wrote:
>
>>I have not yet looked at fruit source, but from my own recollection how
>>to do ETC... in Chest I restrict the usage of ETC to non-trivial depths.
>>If the expected work without ETC probing is too small, the overhead of
>>ETC is does not pay off.  May be fruit does restrict it in such a way,
>>that even the additional overhead of move make/undo is small compared
>>to the potential savings.
>
>Are you using any search extensions in Chest? I think, this is a real problem
>for a normal playing engine. Assume some "mate threat extensions" (decision for
>such an extension for example by doing a shallow search after a null move). I
>see no method, to keep the extensions consistent for ETC, without doing that
>search again. And now, this is not only a makemove, but a real search with many
>makemoves ...
>
>Already keeping normal extensions (that do not depend on a new search, only on
>the position and previous moves) consistent seems not easy, for a "grown"
>engine, that did not think of encapsulating search extension decisions in a
>function, but rather has it all over the place in a long search routine.
>
>It might still be an idea that works, when some special searches are included to
>calculate extensions.
>
>Cheers,
>Dieter

Hi Dieter ,

  One of the ideas that I played around with to improve hashtable efficiency was
(not sure whether this is ETC itself !) this :

Basic Idea :
  In move ordering , if the hash signature of the resulting position after a
MakeMove of this move is already present in the hashtable - increase the move
ordering score.
Even assuming that this does nto lead to immediate cutoff, you will hopefully
get better branching factor since there would be a hashmove from the table that
will help you search better.

There can be different optimisarion techniques to this to improve its efficiency
, when / when not to use it , etc ... but I found the basic idea quiet useful.

Mridul



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