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Subject: Re: How is Hydra faster and better than Deep Blue?

Author: Ricardo Gibert

Date: 14:44:03 05/30/05

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On May 30, 2005 at 16:06:38, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On May 30, 2005 at 07:23:24, Ricardo Gibert wrote:
>
>>On May 30, 2005 at 06:21:14, Pallav Nawani wrote:
>>
>>>On May 30, 2005 at 02:02:49, Amir wrote:
>>>
>>>>Deep Blue could calculate 200 million moves per second. According to what I have
>>>>read, Hydra calculates 40 million moves per second. How then is Hydra sees
>>>>deeper or is faster than Deep Blue, as is claimed by the authors??
>>>
>>>According to the logs that I saw, deep blue was searching 12 plies deep in the
>>>K-DB match. My program can match that depth on a 1.1Ghz PC. This is because of
>>>search techniques that were not used in deep blue. Eg: Null move, Rebel style
>>>reductions, aggressive pruning. Hydra is obviously using such search techniques,
>>>and given its higher processing power, it will easily outsearch Deep Blue. In
>>>fact, in Shredder-Hydra match, shredder was searching to 16 ply (I think, but I
>>>could be wrong) which was almost the same as Hydra (Again, not sure).
>>>
>>>Also, Deep Blue was using Singular Extensions, which increases the number of
>>>nodes required in search.
>>
>>But which also reduces EBF. You should have left out this paragraph.
>
>No.  In fact it increases it significantly.  In Cray Blitz, it reduced our
>average search depth about 2 plies.  Which is a significant _increase_ in
>effective branching factor.

Most extentions result in a reporting of lower depth and an increase in nodes,
but this usually still means a reduction in ebf, because the depth reported does
not take into account the additional depth from the extentions. In short, the
depth reported underrepresents effective depth. As for SE I don't much about it,
but it must be a pretty crappy extention if it really increases EBF.

>
>>
>>>
>>>Also note that 9 plies of program 1 are not the same as 9 plies of program 2.
>>>These programs may be using different search techniques/extensions etc, and
>>>therefore on basis of plies searched you cannot guess the relative strength of
>>>programs. For instance, singular extensions are reputed to increase tactical
>>>strength quite a bit, but they may decrease the depth of search.
>>>
>>>Pallav
>>
>>I better though still imperfect comparison uses:
>>
>>effective_depth = log(nodes)/log(EBF)
>>
>>If given 2 programs where one reports a lower depth, because it does a lot of
>>extentions and another that reports a higher depth, because it does a lot of
>>pruning, but they otherwise generate the same search tree, then the above will
>>return the same effective_depth.
>
>
>log(EBF) is diluting the calculation.  "nodes" is already included in EBF.

ebf**depth = nodes
log(ebf**depth) = log(nodes)
depth*log(ebf) = log(nodes)
depth = log(nodes)/log(ebf)

where ** denotes exponentiation

It's an approximation for comparison purposes only.




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