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Subject: Re: Move Ordering at the Root

Author: Bas Hamstra

Date: 01:49:15 09/16/99

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On September 15, 1999 at 19:42:34, Andrew Williams wrote:

>On September 15, 1999 at 17:12:16, Dan Homan wrote:
>
>>I was reading the crafty source again the other day and noticed that
>>Bob has a special function to improve the move ordering at the root
>>of the search.
>>
>>I really didn't feel like writing such a function last night, but I
>>thought instead to use the values returned by the search itself to
>>improve the move ordering at the root.  I know that I only get an
>>accurate value for the best move, but I thought that my fail-soft
>>search might return useful numbers for the other moves as well....
>>
>>Implementing this was pretty quick and easy: there were a couple
>>of pit falls, but the total changes were about 5 lines of code.
>>Previously I simply used the same move ordering at the root that I
>>use at all other nodes.
>>
>>The improvement was amazing!  I got a full ply in many positions and
>>about a half-ply in many more.   It improved my solution times on WAC
>>noticably and seems even better in quiet positions.
>>
>>I know that my solution was a quick kludge, so I am wondering what
>>other people do for move ordering at the root of the search.
>>
>> - Dan
>
>Hi Dan,
>
>This is what I used to do. (I'm also using fail-soft). It's one of those
>things that shouldn't really work, but seems to do very well. However,
>I later changed it to use the number of nodes in the sub-tree to order
>root moves. If I recall, this made very little difference to my program's
>performance; I just prefer this, because I know why it should work.

Interesting. Isn't this in fact the same discussion as a few days ago?  Using
values < Alpha for movesorting? In this case on the root.

Well, if it shouldn't work, why does it, if it does, if you know what I mean?
And if it works, I would very much like to hear Bob's reaction.

Anyway I will try this too.


Regards,
Bas Hamstra.





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