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

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 18:11:20 07/18/99

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On July 18, 1999 at 17:14:17, Dave Gomboc wrote:

>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.

That's not true, as in the worst case your window is a pawn off.
So the first 5 researches are searching space which is completely useless,
where in PVS the search overhead only depends upon move ordering.

>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.

If you have to step a lot, which is logical as my evaluation ain't dumb,
then it's quite logical that you search more nonsense, which makes it
perform bad.




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