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Subject: Re: null-move

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 17:36:38 08/25/04

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On August 25, 2004 at 17:37:59, Bert van den Bosch wrote:

>First of all, I hope the forum will continue in some way!
>
>Before it is gone, I have a question.
>
>I wanted to check my null move so I tested if the null move would create a
>cutoff, and after that I did the normal stuff. So if you have a cutoff with null
>moving you are almost sure you will also get a cutoff with the normal proces,
>except for zugzwangs of course. But this wasn't happening all the time when I
>tested it, and usually the values involved from what I got back from nullmove
>and from the normal process were just a few centipawns in difference. Could this
>be because of search instabillity? If it isn't a bug in my program I had the
>idea to search nullmove with beta-MARGIN in order for the value returned by null
>move to bridge the few centipawns gap. And taking MARGIN the few centipawns. But
>I'm not sure if that is correct. Can someone shine a light on this?

If the board is crowded, you should almost always get a cutoff.  If the board is
nearly bare, then zugzwang positions become more common.

Omid David Tabibi and Nathan S. Netanyahu wrote a paper on "Verified Null Move"
that takes the assumption that checking the null move is a good idea.  Since
(after all) it is worse than doing nothing, a quick search should verify it.

See this stuff:
http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~davoudo/pubs.html




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