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Subject: Re: Programmers Question: Hashing and Alpha/Beta bounds

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 10:45:23 06/07/05

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On June 06, 2005 at 22:49:52, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>There's nothing wrong with any of that, except that most use a null-window
>search today, which means that 99.9999% of the positions searched have
>alpha=beta-1, so that adjusting the bounds can't actually happen, as if you were
>to be able to adjust the lower bound, you already have enough info to produce a
>fail high, and vice versa...

The 99.9999% first looked like an exaggeration to me (it is one, for normal
engines doing say a not too long search, but I won't discuss how many digits 9
there really should be - the intend of the message is clear). So, I thought
count the nodes (I did not count qsearch nodes). I always use the zero window
from the second move onwards here (no other preconditions). For a depth 12
search of the start position I got:

pv nodes 516, non pv nodes 5390768 99.9904% researches 246

This was about one minute (most nodes are not shown, because they are in
qsearch, where I don't use the PVs algorithm, either). researches is the number
of times, the engine had to do a research inside the tree, because score was >
alpha and < beta, and the first search was done with zero window. Doesn't sound
516 pv nodes too small? Can anybody try with his engine? I just added

#if COUNT_PV_NODES
  if (alpha == beta-1)
    non_pv_nodes++;
  else
    pv_nodes++;
#endif

at the start of the absearch function, and some obvious initialization and
printing code.

Regards,
Dieter



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