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

Author: Dave Gomboc

Date: 14:14:17 07/18/99

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On July 18, 1999 at 14:22:14, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On July 18, 1999 at 14:10:03, Andrew Williams wrote:
>
>>In PostModernist's case it would search 1.03, then 1.02, then 0.98, then
>>0.89, then 0.73, then 0.48. It would then start to work its way back up,
>>0.48, 0.49, 0.51, 0.54 etc.
>
>>So in this example, PM needs a lot of re-searches, but it's not just to
>>do with the gap between the iteration scores - for example, going from 1.03
>>down to 0.48 would be considerably faster than going from 1.03 to 0.72,
>>because of where the scores lie and because of my approach to traversing
>>gaps.
>
>The idea of having more than 1 research is laughable.
>Now you can of course make a statement that the overhead
>isn't *that* high, which is more or less true, but still...

You're forgetting that the searches all cost far less than a PVS search.  You
can sum the total time of 6 researches compared with a PVS implementation, and
the mtd(f) will still be faster more often than not.

If you tried mtd(f) with a serious effort and could not get it to work better
than horribly, my guess would be that the stepping algorithm you used for
researches probably was not up to the task.



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