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Subject: Re: MTD is a big disaster

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 07:53:06 07/20/99

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On July 20, 1999 at 08:52:18, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On July 19, 1999 at 23:35:50, Don Dailey wrote:
>
>>I have noticed a lot of posts lately on the subject of MTD and thought
>>I would give my observations and experiences.  First of all, I would say
>>that MTD is simply a big win.  A lot of people have reported various problems
>>with it including myself.  But all the problems are correctable and you
>>will be rewarded with the fastest possible aspriation search on the planet.
>>All of the problems are based on not completely understanding what is going
>>on and not bothering to stick with it until you figure it out.  Even regular
>>alpha beta searching is full of gotcha's and a lot of people don't fully
>>understand the proper way of doing aspiration searching.   This is forgivable,
>>though, it's complicated and very easy to overlook some of the hairy issues.
>>It's one of those things that seems ridiculously simple once you understand
>>it, but until then is not so simple.
>
>Note that i perfectly understand both algorithms. I don't mind you saying:
>"Even regular alpha beta searching is full of gotcha's and a lot of
> people don't fully understand the proper way of doing aspiration searching."
>
>If however that line is meant for me, then i'm insulted till my bones.
>
>>The lazy evaluation problem is one I ran into with Cilkchess.  When I tried
>>to use lazy evaluation I got big speedups in terms of nodes per second,
>>but the number of nodes inflated to make it NOT a win.  This was quite
>>annoying but was caused because the value you  return to the mtd driver
>>was often "weaker"  because of the "cheat margin" you used with your
>>evaluation.    The solution is not to use beta (the single goal value
>>of an mtd probe) but to use the global lower/upper bound that the mtd
>>driver itself keeps track of.  Apply your scoring margins to THOSE values
>>because they are "true" bounds, not speculative bounds.  I learned about
>>this from discussions with others at the world computer chess championship.
>>It was one of those things that should have been obvious to me but wasn't.
>
>In DIEP i don't have a lazy eval problem, as i don't use lazy eval.
>I'm completely against it. Let's say i know too much about lazy eval
>to let my hashtables be spoiled with them.
>
>I get however a 60% speedup by using a simple hashtable that only
>stores my eval. This goes down to 50% speedup when loading factor
>becomes huge (way above 1).
>
>As i know most programs are not using a eval hashtable, i think
>i may point to my eval table for this reason. What they achieve
>with lazy eval, i achieve more or less with an eval table.
>



make that "less".  I did this for two years in crafty.  The problem is
that Lazy Eval can give you a 30-50% speed increase.  No way you will get
30-50% hash hits to fetch the eval and speed up your code that same amount.

I stopped hashing evals when I stopped hashing qsearch nodes, since there was
no point when not hashing qsearch.  However _I_ consider lazy eval to be a
winner...  and the win gets bigger as the eval gets bigger...


>>I would like to mention that I was forced to use MTD and solve these
>>problems (also problems like bad PV's) because it was simply faster,
>>and if the speedup was trivial I would have gladly just avoided the
>>issue!
>>- Don
>
>Don, i don't doubt MTD is faster for your programs.
>
>Let's however write down some facts why my prog is unhappy with MTD.
>It's up to others to generalize it to their progs:
>
>  - the huge number of researches needed. In DIEP my evaluation is nowadays
>    in 1/1000 of a pawn. For a long time i had 1/200 of a pawn (in the time
>    i experimented with MTD), but now i have 1/1000 of a pawn. So a drop
>    of 0.20 pawn, which is a normal drop in DIEP, is in fact a drop of 200
>    points. Happy researching!
>  - My evaluation has a lot of knowledge, so i can expect every iteration
>    a different behaviour of it, although the ups and downs in evaluation
>    every ply i've figured out are mainly caused by the mobility component,
>    this means nevertheless that i'm sure that i need a lot of researches.
>  - As my DIEP needs very little nodes a ply (must see the first prog
>    needing less when also turning off the forward pruning, except for
>    nullmove), although i don't dare to say that my sorting is optimal,
>    *everything* but near optimal i prefer to say, this means however
>    that all overhead i have to search is too much overhead for it.
>
>    Secondly it simply happens to be the case that
>    when searching using a bound of 0.10 that all scores that get returned
>    are very near to it (nullmove). This has the nasty habit that a lot
>    of bounds stored
>    in the transpositiontable will not work next research, and as we know we
>    have a lot of researches to do, then it's easy to realize that this
>    gives a lot of overhead which is simply unnecessary.
>  - Chess is a worst case game. That means that if you have one big weak spot,
>    that you are complete history. Even at nowadays hardware a weak spot of
>    DIEP is its search speed. It's getting 15k nodes a second at a PII450.
>    Now i can have a branching factor like heaven, but still it won't search
>    very deep, unless i give it a lot of time. At very slow levels like 3
>    minutes a move it usual will even search near the opponents depth, or
>    sometimes even deeper, because of this branching factor, but up to the
>    first 90 seconds or so, for sure a program that's 20 times slower than
>    its opponents is not likely to search deeper.
>
>    So it's important to realize that it already doesn't search deeply,
>    when getting to my point:
>    in very complicated positions where the score goes up and down a lot,
>    or where a few fail lows occur, that usual are very important points in
>    a game. Now we all give our programs more time, but still those positions
>    it not seldom searches 2 or 3 ply less or so than in other middlegame
>    positions. In those complicated positions a lot of games get decided.
>    It is in those positions that MTD has a major weak spot.
>    MTD can't stand a lot of researches. So there where one needs its search
>    algorithm the most, there MTD has a major shortcoming. There MTD shows its
>    worst case and simply abandons you, needing up to 6 times more nodes.
>
>    Now you can do the math. That's a laughable DEPTH i get then. If i
>    search a few moves at a depth of 9 ply, and all others at like 13
>    or 14 ply, then i'm completely smoked.
>
>    Even the tactical barrier where we talked about some years ago,
>    and was estimated by me at 12 ply, is 3 plies off that.
>
>    Doing 9 ply searches is back to the old days!
>    Now 9 versus 13/14 ply is an example, but it clearly shows my point.
>
>    MTD is simply a worst case/ best case algorithm. If scores are
>    very close to each other (usually when there is only 1 obvious move
>    to make), then it will not perform bad, but quickly get to the next ply.
>    If MTD scores are not close, and a lot of different PVs follow each other
>    up, then MTD has a major problem.
>
>It's obvious that MTD is a dead wrong algorithm for computerchess!
>
>If Don would say: "average it needs less nodes in Cilkchess", then considering
>how Cilkchess has been made and how all progs of Don are, i directly
>believe him on his word.
>
>What will remain of those results when you get a better eval in the future?
>How about a worst case analysis of MTD versus PVS?
>
>Vincent Diepeveen
>diep@xs4all.nl


I personally think mtd(f) can probably work fine. I think it takes the same
kind of commitment I made to bitboards 5 years ago... that is that I was going
to use them for at least 5 years before giving up.  Because it took me a big
part of that time to get everything "right".  I think mtd(f) is the same.  I
spent 3 months fiddling with it and didn't like what I saw.  But possibly if I
spent 2 years I might like it better.  It takes time for a lot of 'tricks' to
surface with any algorightmmm.



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