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Subject: Re: Uri's ETC

Author: Richard Pijl

Date: 14:29:19 03/24/04

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On March 24, 2004 at 16:44:12, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On March 24, 2004 at 14:26:04, Tom Likens wrote:
>
>>On March 24, 2004 at 05:39:20, Tord Romstad wrote:
>>
>>>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
>>
>>How do you handle extensions?  Currently, most of my extensions are
>>set after the engine moves and since the extensions affect the draft
>>(which in turn affects the validity of the hash match) it seems like this is
>>a problem.  This might be workable (in my current scheme) if I started
>>tracking the extensions that were triggered by a move in the hash
>>table.
>
>You are right, this is a problem.  My "solution" is to ignore the problem
>and hope it isn't too important in practice.
>

My solution to that problem is not to do a cutoff, but order the cutoff move
first in the movelist. That way the regular search will find the cutoff move as
the first move.
Richard.




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