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Subject: Re: Extending Checks

Author: José Carlos

Date: 10:36:46 09/12/04

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  Hi Scott,

[...]
>I thought this is what he was talking about too.  My take on Ed's page is that
>he extends the depth in qsearch at which he will consider checking moves by 2
>ply when a side in check only has 1 legal way out.  This is _way_ different than
>extending by 2 ply in the main search -- that would cause a node explosion
>especially if you also extend on the checking move!
>
>I tried Ed's idea in qsearch too and found the same thing as you, José.  Then I
>decided to try to restrict where I did it... 1. to only do it when the guy in
>check's king safety score indicated that he was in some danger and 2. to only do
>it when the side in check has not had a chance to stand pat yet.  Oh and 3. I
>don't do it past a certain number of plies from the root... something like
>iterate_depth * 3 or so.  This keeps it under control but it doesn't solve Ed's
>tricky mate in 30 by checking a million times with the knight position (Note:
>Stuart: that is the position you posted last week, so you're on the right track
>for solving it!)


  I understand that you're talking about in-check positions, not generate-checks
positions, right?
  There're are some problems in both types of positions, but I think it's
generate-checks positions that blow up the tree. In these positions, you need
hashing (as Ed says in other post) and I also found useful to try some
restrictions, for example not trying checks with SEE < 0 (Tord's idea), disable
it in some endings, like queen endings, not trying checks in clearly lost
positions, and some other ideas that I don't remember now.


[...]
>This is what I do too.  Write a legal move generator and only do it when you're
>in check.  Then you can detect stuff like: 1. One legal move, 2. In check by
>more than one piece, 3. No legal king moves etc...  I extend to some degree on
>all of these.


  Interesting. I also detected all of those but didn't extend. All in all, I
wasn't using fractional extensions there. If I continue with chess programming
some day, I'll try those extensions.

  José C.



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