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Subject: Re: Uri's ETC

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 02:39:20 03/24/04

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On March 24, 2004 at 05:17:56, Peter Fendrich wrote:

>Uri didn't invent ETC if that's what you imply!
>
>Given your story about costly move/unmove functions it's possible that ETC gives
>you some savings. Without ETC you will hit the cutoff anyway in the child node
>and with smaller unmove costs ETC is not that effective IMHO.

It seems to me that you miss part of the idea of ETC.  You are right that
you will get the cutoff in the child node even without ETC, but in which
child node?  If your move ordering is not perfect, there is a risk that
you will have to search many moves before you get the cutoff.  When you
use ETC, you check the hash values for *all* child nodes before you
start searching, which can sometimes save a lot of nodes.

To me, ETC has always been a clear win.  The last time I made any
experiments, it reduced my tree size by about 10% at high search depths.
I am fairly sure it is a technique which works better with MTD(f) than
with more conventional search algorithms, though.

Tord



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