Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: null move search reduction factor

Author: Andrew Williams

Date: 16:27:32 06/25/04

Go up one level in this thread


On June 25, 2004 at 16:15:44, Stuart Cracraft wrote:

>So, normally in the literature I've read
>(and code I've implemented, it's been to
>do a null move search with R set to 2,
>so search(...depth-1-R).
>
>But in large searches of 8, 9, 10, 11 and
>beyond in full width searches, the reduction
>of 2 does not seem to help as much as
>larger reductions due to the much smaller
>subtrees that the null move searches has
>to search with an R of 2.
>
>My question is: what have people done
>to experiment with larger figures of R and
>verify the return value is effective
>and horrid moves aren't produced?
>
>I've used R set to ply/2 and ply-2
>where ply is the original target depth
>of the overall iteration. The savings
>in time is substantial and the moves
>look the same or as good, the tree searched is
>drastically smaller of course, but
>I am worried about quality.
>
>Is R of 2 or 3 a holdover from the slow
>computing days in the literature and nowadays
>you are using higher settings?
>
>Assume everything else about the null move
>search is held the same (not done in endgames,
>not done in the original position, no more
>than 1 null move in a row during the search
>without an intervening normal move, etc.)
>
>Thanks ahead,
>
>Stuart

Ernst Heinz has published interesting papers on adaptive null move pruning
(varying R with remaining depth and remaining material). I would guess that this
is pretty standard now, at least among amateurs. Omid David Tabibi has published
recently on verified null move pruning.

Cheers

Andrew




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.