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Subject: Re: Restricting extensions

Author: Scott Gasch

Date: 16:39:10 09/12/04

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On September 12, 2004 at 18:19:04, Volker Böhm wrote:

>Hi Scott,
>
>the idea behind a check-extension is not only to find great attacks beginning
>with a checking move. One other major idea is to prevent horizont effects.
>Example: you give away a piece for a really good attack. But the opponent has
>the opportunity to give you some checks, pushing the really good attack out of
>sight. Extending the checks in positions below alpha helps to fix this problem.
>
>I never found a good idea to reduce check extension.

I always extend a checking move 1 ply.  What I'm talking about is deciding to
either extend or not extend the one legal response on the next ply.  I agree
with you about checks: I've never found a way to safely not extend them.  Even
if the checking side is way ahead it could be checking just to push something
really bad over the horizon.

>By the way why do you extend on promotion? I never heard anyone doing it. Thus
>maybe the reduction will work here (the more reduction the better :-)
>
>A reduction that gained a little was the pawn-pushed-to-row-7 extension that I
>only extend, if the pawn on row 7 cannot be taken without material loss (SEE >=
>0).

I wonder if the price of running the SEE on such a move is worth it.  Or are you
doing it with attack tables?  I do the poor man's version of that -- I don't
extend a pawn push if there's a piece blocking it in its new position.

>Something that could be tested (I think) is the reduction of the
>take-back-extension that is perhaps not that usefull if far away from the
>search-window.
>
>On the other hand: maybe futility, extended futility and razoring is a better
>concept than reducing extensions by comparing against alpha and beta. Thus I
>think you should test your ideas only if you have at least futility.

I have futlity in the qsearch but nothing else.  The first post I made is about
how if you decide to extend or not based on bounds you could run into a
situation where you search with a minimal window, decide to extend, fail high,
research with a full window, decide not to extend, and fail low.

I think the same thing is possible with all this futility stuff people like to
do: if you are deciding to prune moves or not based on alpha you can search
quite a different tree on the research of a node with a full window, right?

Scott




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