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Subject: Re: Building the Principal Variation in MTD(f) searches

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 11:36:08 07/18/99

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On July 18, 1999 at 14:27:58, Dan Andersson wrote:

>>We all don't doubt that MTD is a fine algorithm. Regrettably it only
>>works for programs using an evaluation which gives very little deviation;
>>
>>See the score differences the first few ply in DIEP's lines:
>>
>>0.87
>>1.21
>>0.63
>>0.87
>>1.29
>>0.93
>>0.94
>>0.94
>>1.00
>>1.03
>>0.77
>>0.78
>>0.82
>>0.89
>>1.03
>>0.80
>>0.81
>>0.80
>>0.86
>>0.84
>>1.03
>>0.65
>>0.97
>>1.04
>>1.20
>>1.02
>>1.15
>>0.88
>>0.98
>>0.86
>>
>>And those deviations still considering it's a position where there is
>>not too much tactics.
>>
>>Getting the big fail low at 14 ply caused a jump from 1.03 to 0.65
>>which took 28.00M / 12.49 = 2.24 branching factor
>>
>>Just imagine the huge number of researches that MTD needs
>>to get to 0.65!
>
>Probably one or a few re-searches only, I have not noticed that drawback in my
>project. The problem is to implement lazy evaluation, thus the correlation
>between pawn-values and evaluation as you mentioned.
>I use a alpha-betaized evaluation function (it orders the evaluation factors in
>a binary search and cuts off when it is out of alpha or beta boundaries and
>returns alpha or beta) and save the state of the evaluation function in the hash
>table if the position was not fully evaluated, to continue evaluating later if
>needed. This way I get the benefits of MTD and lazy evaluation. i.e alpa-beta
>evaluation cut evaluation time by 75% and it allows bootsrapping evaluation
>values.


A few researches is already more than the single research PVS needs
at max!

What lazy evalution are we talking about?
I don't have lazy evaluation. Lazy evaluation doesn't work for me

>>
>>Because let's face it, what program *actually* use MTD currently:
>>
>>parallel version of fritz (?) :  evaluation of it under 200 clocks
>>cilkchess                     :  evaluation also is very limited and
>>                                 definitely doesn't have huge scores,
>>                                 we all know that cilkchess evaluation is
>>                                 always very close to the number of pawns that
>>                                 it sees.
>>SOS                           :  same comment valid as for cilkchess
>>
>>So the programs using MTD currently have hardly anything in their evaluation
>>not many things causing big scores,
>>so claiming that MTD is doing a good job is only true when taking into
>>account this restriction, which a lot of programs do not wish to have.
>>
>>Greetings,
>>Vincent



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