Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Razoring? (Clarification)

Author: Ernst A. Heinz

Date: 06:20:23 01/28/99

Go up one level in this thread


On January 28, 1999 at 00:24:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 27, 1999 at 16:28:59, Ernst A. Heinz wrote:
>
>>On January 27, 1999 at 16:08:10, Ernst A. Heinz wrote:
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>>Where and why did the term "pruning" get misused in your opinion?
>>>
>>>1. Normal futility pruning (as coined by Jonathan in his Ph.D.thesis),
>>>2. extended futility pruning (as coined by me in the ICCA Journal), and
>>>3. futility pruning in the quiescence search (as done by almost anybody)
>>>
>>>all *cut* (or prune if you like) moves at the nodes where they are applied
>>>according to my above explanation.
>>
>>Just a short addition: "to cut a move" of course means to cut the whole subtree
>>spanned by it.
>>
>>Hence, the only misnomer I can detect is that Peter McKenzie and you denoted
>>a depth reduction as "razoring" although the original term "razoring" as coined
>>by Birmingham and Kent in 1977 clearly r eferred to real pruning by stopping the
>>search completely at the respective nodes (i.e. all moves get cut off).
>>
>>=Ernst=
>
>correct.. and razoring may be the wrong term on my part.  I spent a bit of time
>trying to find the most recent article I read on razoring ideas.  The 1977 or
>so one I have, but there has been something different.  Maybe in one of the
>'synopsis papers' I have in my file and not the JICCA as I thought.
>
>All I know at present is that what I call "razoring" came from something I read
>within the last two years, based on the comments in main.c that indicate about
>when I added it.  It wasn't something I developed at all, just something I tried
>and it seemed to work, after seeing someone else write about it.  I will
>continue searching for it however..

In 1977 Birmingham and Kent also suggested a depth reduction for what they
called "deep razoring". This was meant to apply their normal and already quite
unsound razoring cuts in an even riskier fashion by comparing results of "deep"
searches with static evaluations or shallower searches at nodes far above the
frontier.

Maybe the misnomer stems from this idea of "deep razoring".

=Ernst=



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.