Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Anyone disagree with this?

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 09:01:17 10/11/05

Go up one level in this thread


On October 11, 2005 at 05:35:57, chandler yergin wrote:

>On October 11, 2005 at 05:11:57, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On October 11, 2005 at 04:39:01, chandler yergin wrote:
>>
>>>On October 11, 2005 at 04:08:58, Bruce Moreland wrote:
>>>
>>>>On October 10, 2005 at 23:37:41, chandler yergin wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>http://chess.verhelst.org/1997/03/10/search/
>>>>>
>>>>>"Tree search is one of the central algorithms of any game playing program. The
>>>>>term is based on looking at all possible game positions as a tree, with the
>>>>>legal game moves forming the branches of this tree. The leaves of the tree are
>>>>>all final positions, where the outcome of the game is known. The problem for
>>>>>most interesting games is that the size of this tree is tremendously huge,
>>>>>something like W^D, where W is the average number of moves per position and D is
>>>>>the depth of the tree, Searching the whole tree is impossible, mainly due to
>>>>>lack of time, even on the fastest computers. All practical search algorithms are
>>>>>approximations of doing such a full tree search."
>>>>
>>>>It's true for chess.  Some aspects are not true for tic-tac-toe, and some others
>>>>are not true for other games that aren't like chess.
>>>>
>>>>I don't know where you are going with this.  It's possible to make a lot of
>>>>assertions about chess programs that people will agree with unless they don't
>>>>understand the assertion.  That the chess tree is too big to search to its
>>>>limits with any sane hardware is obvious.  Someone might mention quantum
>>>>computers here, but that doesn't fall into the category of sane.
>>>>
>>>>bruce
>>>
>>> Thanks Bruce for your response...
>>>Where am I going? I'm trying to get a consensus of opinion before I embarrass
>>>myself..  But on the other hand I'm used to that.
>>>No, this is strictly about chess.. not Tic tac toe or other games.
>>>I expected a negative response from Uri, and he has Posted that Programs do not
>>>evaluate every move in a position.
>>
>>programs do not evaluate every move in a position that they search
>>and it does not contradict your post.
>>
>>programs have pruning rules.
>>It is written also in your post that
>>"Searching the whole tree is impossible, mainly due to
>>lack of time, even on the fastest computers."
>>
>>>Well, you know that is not true.
>>>Rather than have a long thread and dialog with him, I was hoping that other
>>>Programmers would agree about the Tree ..search function analysis mode etc.
>>>I think that is a given, so we'll start from here.
>>>It should be obvious that he who runs the fastest wins the race.
>>>The Program/Engine that searches  the deepest & faster in the alloted time,
>>>finds the 'best' moves.
>>>Would you agree?
>>
>>No
>>
>>A program may search deeper but still lose because of inferior evaluation.
>
>No, We disagree 100% The Program truly does evaluate 'every' possible move in
>any position! It ranks them in order of the highest return from the Alpha Beta
>& Mini/Max algorithim. The centipawn eval is based only on the static positional
>factors programmed in. The program that searches the deepest in the
>alloted time will find the better moves.
>I don't understand why you don't understand this!

They use forward pruning.  What forward pruning means is that they are *not*
guaranteed to find everything in an N-ply search that an N-ply min-max search
will find.

bruce



This page took 0 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.