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Subject: Re: U2600 Club Dec 21 Rating List

Author: Andrew Williams

Date: 11:36:40 12/24/98

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On December 21, 1998 at 22:09:22, Will Singleton wrote:

>
>Perhaps you could share some of your implementation details.  You know,
>extension triggers, search method, etc.  I'd be interested.
>

Hi Will,

PostModernist is an MTD(f)-based program. It uses null move with a depth
reduction of 2. For a while I used the Extended Futility Pruning method
advocated by Ernst Heinz in JICCA, but the program was weaker with it than
without it. Subsequent discussion here suggested that this was because at
blitz time controls it wasn't searching deep enough to support this heuristic.
I recently ditched killer-moves, but subsequently found a horrendous bug
elsewhere which might have been causing the killers not to work properly. I'll
be trying them again in the near future. I use the history heuristic.

PostModernist recreates its PV from the transposition table and ponders in the
normal way. The TT is probably over complex; it keeps upper and lower bound
scores plus a draft for each bound. The rules for updating a TT entry are
complicated; it seems to work at the moment, so I'm leaving it alone. There's
a normal TT, plus an "always-store" TT, plus a pawn score TT. The latter seems
pretty inefficient compared to some of the figures quoted here for other
programs.

A few months ago, you asked a question here about "encouraging" certain types
of moves by giving ply 1 bonuses. I was doing this too, until the advice came
back that this was a bad idea.

I spent a lot of time on search extensions and at the moment I extend on check,
pawn landing on 7th rank and equal capture/re-capture on same square.

PostModernist's opening book is created from the games in TWIC 141-199 (I'm
planning to get the TWIC CD soon, so I'll expand it then). It does NO learning,
although I've been looking at Steffen's (Hossa) approach, which he talked about
here some time ago.

Hope this is helpful. What about the rest of you?


>Regarding the auto-rematch issue, what I do is keep a list of opponents played
>during the current session, and when 4 games have been played by the same
>opponent, I decline any other games with it (him).  This seems to work out
>pretty well, along with the noplay list.
>
>Perhaps you winboard guys can't easily get your opponent names to stuff in an
>array.  Don't know about that.

I used to do this (it's easy to find out who you are playing). I had a load of
problems with it so I stopped. I'll have to put it back in.

Regards

Andrew



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