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Subject: Re: Low number of beta cuts

Author: Vasik Rajlich

Date: 00:56:09 02/04/06

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On February 04, 2006 at 03:21:12, Bernd Nürnberger wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I have a question concerning the rate of beta cuts. My program prunes the tree
>by doing a beta cut at about 5-10% of all nodes. This seems rather low to me.
>Thus most moves that were generated are actually made. Nethertheless I am
>getting rather low node counts and a mediocre first cut rate: for WAC (pos
>1-300) at depth 8, my program searches about 69 M nodes with a first cut rate of
>88%.
>
>Now to the question: is a cut rate of 5..10% common?? I often heard that most
>moves generated are nether done because of beta cuts. That's not the case in my
>program.
>For WAC (depth 8) 88 M nodes are generated and 69 M nodes are done !
>
>Configuration:
>- Hash Table (1 M entries, deep/new two-level replacement)
>- Razoring/(Extended) Futility Pruning
>- Null Move (rather aggressive)
>- Move Ordering:
>   x   hash move   (IID)
>   x   winning + equals caps  (by SEE, only x-rays capturer)
>   x   killer 1 / killer 2
>   x   non-caps (history heuristics)
>   x   losing caps
>- PVS / aspiration search
>- QS (prunes rather aggresively using SEE)
>- plain vanilla eval (mat + pc-sq + boni/penality for castlings)
>
>Any comments appreciated :-)
>
>Bernd

In a classical search without razoring-type stuff you'll fail high at well over
90% of nodes, and will need much fewer than 69M nodes to do 8 iterations.

It's possible you have the alpha-beta logic mixed up. You might want to step
through a sample variation move by move. For this the "Chant" tool (advertised
here from the search engine page) is quite handy, it's what I use.

Vas



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