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Subject: Re: SEE results

Author: Gerd Isenberg

Date: 02:48:14 08/11/04

Go up one level in this thread


<snip>
>What I said was this:  Hsu and I had a "discussion" about SEE vs MVV/LVA in
>rec.games.chess.computer.  I claimed that SEE was better, he claimed MVV/LVA was
>just as good.
>

Fine that this discussions are still available via google group search!
Very interesting reading.

http://groups.google.de/groups?hl=de&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=jwes.809762643%40BIX.com&rnum=22&prev=/groups%3Fq%3D%2522Feng-Hsiung%2BHsu%2522%26hl%3Dde%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26start%3D20%26sa%3DN


>I first modified Crafty's q-search and normal search so that it used MVV/LVA to
>order captures (there was a version or two of this released so that others could
>run the tests as well).  This version could _not_ prune captures as MVV/LVA
>doesn't give enough information to decide whether a capture loses or wins...  IE
>if the largest piece hanging is a rook, and the smallest attacker is a queen,
>MVV/LVA tries QXR first, whether the rook is defended or not.
>
>I then modified the normal crafty to use SEE but without excluding losing
>captures, since MVV/LVA q-search had to try all captures for safety.
>
>I compared the two and found that SEE produced 10% smaller trees (this was on a
>fast machine for significant searches) but was 10% slower, meaning there was no
>advantage for either.
>
>Then I turned my original quisecence search pruning back on, something that
>works for SEE but not MVV/LVA and the tree size dropped by 50% over a test set
>of positions.  This was based solely on the idea of (a) no SEE losing captures
>(no reference to alpha/beta or the infamous "delta pruning" I now use);  (b)
>after 4 plies of q-search, no "exchanges" (even trades) either.  That was what
>early Crafty did, copied from a simple CB q-search that I used after the normal
>CB q-search gave up on checks and threats and went to a simple capture-only
>search near the end of the variations.
>
>My current "delta pruning" approach is even more effective in eliminating
>q-search nodes.  It would be easy to turn it off to compare tree sizes of
>course.



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