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Subject: Using SEE to score capture moves

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 17:08:07 09/05/04


Odd improvement...

I had used see within quiescence to discard moves
< 0 of see value (losing combinations) and those
that didn't make it past a certain margin (futility
cutoff / delta pruning).

At the time I had added a capability in the move
generator when a move is added that scored any
capture with see and stored it for later use.
This was then used in the quiescence as above
for discarding, avoiding using the generate there.

But because of having to do the see for each move
in the main search, the net result was worse performance
on test suite, not better.

So I just made a separate routine to keep the see() running
completely out of the main search, do it for all capture
moves all the time in quiescence but at time move is added
to movelist instead of at time move is searched. This resulted
in 1% improvement in score:

wacnew

**** 6.80/23.83 80% 240/300 250.67 73082144 243607/1/291553 0/871282/397085/1606
781/18010090/63447

wacnew with the see() call in movelist routine instead of quiescence,
but still used in quiescence

**** 6.81/27.35 81% 244/300 249.71 74112552 247042/1/296798 0/854177/1447453/515
821/17298092/99799

Not quite sure why this occurred. There may be some other confounding factor
that I just got lucky with when making the change.

I looked more carefully and saw a side change I had made was simply to add
the "see" score into the mvv/lva and then make that the pre-search score
of the move from the move-generation routine.

Previously, mvv/lva was used only, unless the global see() use in move
generation for all captures for both main search and quiescence search was
used.

Now, see score is added in, with mvv/lva, in move generation, for all captures
but only in quiescence -- see is not used in main search.

Anyway, add your see score in like the above and see if you experience
a small jump, rather than just using <0 to decide whether to cut. You
get the benefit of the sort, helping the move ordering.

I speak only to the ones who didn't do this already.

Stuart



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