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Subject: Re: null move efficiency

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 08:01:36 04/22/04

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On April 21, 2004 at 03:30:03, Tony Werten wrote:

>On April 20, 2004 at 12:42:14, Tord Romstad wrote:
>
>>On April 20, 2004 at 07:45:16, Sune Fischer wrote:
>>
>>>>>>>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.
>>
>>I do some static threat detection in my eval.  Perhaps this is why this
>>works better for me than for you and Tony.
>
>I have a full static mate detection wich can detect up to mate in 7. I call it
>for side to move.
>
>Calling it for side not to move seems to be more expensive than just doing a
>nullmove.

Duh,

after the nullmove, sides have swapped, so I basicly call it for side not to
move, just one ply later.

If I call it before nullmove, most of the time I would end up doing it twice in
a row, wich is too expensive (or I should hash it, hmm yet another hashtable ?).

Tony


>
>Tony
>



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