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Subject: Re: nullmove and tactics

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 01:17:25 03/26/04

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On March 26, 2004 at 03:02:04, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On March 26, 2004 at 02:39:29, Johan de Koning wrote:
>
>>>I thought so, too, but after watching the first two games of a blitz match
>>>between the normal version of my engine and an identical version with the
>>>null move disabled I am already beginning to doubt it.  The non-nullmove
>>>version is leading by 2-0.
>>
>>IIRC it was only 2 days ago Will Singleton posted a funny remark about
>>discarding null moves after 10 games. :-)
>
>Yes, I remember.  :-)
>
>I wasn't really close to discarding null moves, of course, but I was surprised
>that the version without null move had any chance at all, and that the
>difference in search depth was not greater.  I expect the null move version
>to win by a clear margin when enough games are played, but it will be
>interesting to see how big the difference is.  After 8 games, it's 4-4.
>
>>>The difference in search depth isn't as big as I expected.  In the middle
>>>game, the null move version typically reaches about 12 plies, while the
>>>version without null move reaches 11 plies.
>>
>>Hmmm... that sounds pretty incredible.
>>We're not talking about 11 ply full-width here, are we?
>
>No, I do lots of pruning besides null-move, and reach rather high search
>depths even without it.  Here are the number of nodes I need to search
>n plies (n from 1 to 13) with and without null move from the opening
>position:
>
>Plies   Nodes (null move off)   Nodes (null move on)
> 1                 55                      55
> 2                228                     261
> 3                965                     439
> 4              3,741                   2,318
> 5             13,213                   6,638
> 6             35,056                  18,964
> 7             37,398                  36,095
> 8             77,226                  60,240
> 9            117,274                 109,939
>10            239,355                 237,775
>11            555,661                 412,969
>12          1,942,523               1,084,089
>13         12,060,312               3,531,279
>
>I have no good explanation for the bizarrely irregular effective
>branching factor of my non-nullmove search here.  I wonder how it is
>possible that hardly any nodes are needed in the 7th iteration.
>
>Tord

I find it strange that you have 55 nodes for searching depth 1 in the initial
position.
I think that 20 or 21 is the normal number.

What extensions do you do that are relevant for the first ply?

Uri



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