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

Author: Dave Gomboc

Date: 14:00:32 07/19/99

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On July 19, 1999 at 16:06:49, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On July 19, 1999 at 13:41:37, Dave Gomboc wrote:
>
>>On July 19, 1999 at 06:14:45, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On July 19, 1999 at 00:14:28, Dave Gomboc wrote:
>>>
>>>>On July 18, 1999 at 21:11:20, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>>
>>
>>[snip]
>>
>>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>The more useless the search, the quicker it terminates.  If you're a pawn off, a
>>>>cutoff should be extremely quick.  Searches that are close to the proper value
>>>>take longer, precisely because they are searching space that is not "completely
>>>>useless", as you put it.  And that effort will be caught in the hash table, so
>>>>you don't have to search it twice.
>>>
>>>That's not entirely true.
>>>
>>>a) it's overhead which PVS doesn't search
>>
>>mtd(f) searches minimal trees to prove what it needs to prove.  PVS also has a
>>lot of overhead that mtd(f) doesn't search.
>
>You really eat that?

Yeah, I do.  Of course, pointing out that Tony _invented_ PVS, that Jonathan
worked a lot with Aske on mtd(f), and that both of them are my professors
wouldn't affect your opinion of what is reasonable for me to eat, would it?

I'm not trying to say that I know everything because of these people or
something.  What I am saying is that I am learning from people who really know
what they are talking about.  So when I'm told in my Heuristic Search class that
over the long run, mtd(f) should do better than PVS, and our class discusses the
various issues involved over a period of time, and several programs developed at
the U of A back up the claim of the professor, then I think I have a pretty good
reason to believe that "PVS also has a lot of overhead that mtd(f) doesn't
search."

Compare that to say, some of your claims.  You claim "improvements to cray-blitz
parallel search", even though Diep's parallel search is completely buggy, by
your own admission.  So when you say that mtd(f) sucks, it's no wonder that I'm
going to take it with a grain or three of salt.

>>>b) you do not get it from hashtable as you search with a way lower bound
>>>   next iteration, and then another lower research, where nullmove
>>>   has the habit to give for alfa and beta scores back which are simply
>>>   equal to alfa and beta. So you do need to research and can't
>>>   use hashtable cheap
>
>>When the score doesn't move far, a ton of the re-search is in the hash table.
>>When it does, the first search didn't take very long anyway.
>
>Please reread what i wrote. Your assumption is not true. Score is namely
>far of.

I read what you wrote.  You still haven't quantified the performance loss of
mtd(f) vs. PVS for Diep.  I think that if that loss is huge, something in your
software is seriously broken (i.e. not the algorithm itself, which works fine.)

Dave



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