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Subject: Re: null move efficiency

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 04:45:16 04/20/04

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>>>>2. Don't make a null move if the static eval is far below beta.
>>>
>>>Actually, you can drop 2 as well :)
>>>
>>>Move ordering is much better if you just nullmove everywhere. That way, you can
>>>also throw out IID.
>
>That's not my experience.  Nullmoving everywhere doesn't noticably improve
>my move ordering, and it increases the size of the game tree (by around
>15-20%, if I recall correctly).  Throwing out IID doesn't help.
>
>Perhaps this depends on how your move ordering works.

Number 2 doesn't seem to work for me either, I think the explanation is rather
simple. A nullmove is relative cheap, if I detect correctly 75% of the time that
a nullmove is futile, then that still means I detect it wrong 25% of the time.
As it turns out these 3 savings of a nullmove doesn't outweigh the 1 full search
which could have produced a fast cutoff.
The end result is a bigger tree for me.

In principle it can work, but you must be very accurate in guessing when not to
nullmove because a full search is very expensive.

>>In addition, throw out the 2nd half of 1 as well. If my opponent is going to
>>checkmate me, I want to know so I can extend.
>
>I don't understand what you say here.  In the 2nd half of 1, I suggested to
>avoid null move search if you already know (without search) that mate in
>1 is threatened.  What extra information do you expect to get from a null
>move search?

I think there are some practical problems in detecting when you are mate in 1.
I requires a lot of coding and a big eval with attack scanning around the king
etc. A faster implementation of the same thing is simply to nullmove and
fail-low.

Btw, extending on threats completely blows up the tree for me, it seems there
are certain position in the tree where you just have to live with a constant
mate threat. Practicly all nodes gets extended here and a blowup is unavoidable.

I think it would be better to extend on a newly detected mate threat, ie. the
ply before we wasn't being mated.

-S.
>Tord



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