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Subject: Re: History pruning

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:24:58 02/27/06

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On February 27, 2006 at 19:48:49, Tom Likens wrote:

>On February 27, 2006 at 19:36:10, Tom Likens wrote:
>
>>On February 27, 2006 at 13:41:57, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On February 27, 2006 at 12:46:40, Frank Phillips wrote:
>>>
>>>>So you do this at only (expected) cut nodes?
>>>>Tord seems to imply at anything other than pvNodes.
>>>>
>>>>Frank
>>>
>>>
>>>I do it at _all_ nodes.  I think Tord does as well.  The problem is it is
>>>impossible to predict with high accuracy whether a node is CUT or ALL (btw, this
>>>is only useful at ALL nodes, since we have to search all moves and reducing the
>>>depth reduces the effort required to accomplish that).
>>
>>Bob/Tord,
>>
>>I just got to my hotel (I'm on a business trip for the next few days) and I
>>see CCT8 has sparked a number of interesting threads.  Reductions are
>>especially fertile ground.
>>
>>I'd be careful reducing at PV nodes.  I saw a significant drop in djinn's
>>positional strength when I applied this at PV nodes.  At the very least
>>you might want to skip it at nodes where alpha/beta == RootAlpha/RootBeta.
>>Ideally, as you mentioned you only want to apply this at ALL nodes.
>
>Actually, thinking a bit more about this--makes me wonder why the history
>table didn't prevent these nodes from being reduced anyway.  It may be time
>for an experiment to determine how often a "PV" node doesn't have any history
>table information.  I would think intuitively this should not happen very
>often.
>
>>I've also experimented with "flipping" CUT nodes to ALL nodes if we search
>>more than 'x' moves at a CUT node without a fail-high or an improvement
>>in the score.  Once the flip occurs all the nodes below are toggled in the
>>normal CUT -> ALL -> CUT etc., and these nodes become eligible for reduction.
>>
>>Also do you allow multiple recursive reductions or do you limit them?  I've
>>applied the adaptive reduction idea a while back, with mixed results.  It's
>>likely I didn't test this enough because I was in the middle of a major
>>project at work and could only give it a small percentage of my attention :-(
>>
>>regards,
>>--tom


actually I believe you are right.  I think I actually noticed this in testing
but had forgotten.  And one _could_ force this to happen.  I stuff the PV into
the hash table at the end of each iteration, just in case some of the entries
got overwritten.  I could stuff a significant value (say 2* history threashold)
into the corresponding history values just as easily...



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