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Subject: Re: Move Ordering at the Root

Author: Andrew Dados

Date: 11:48:03 09/17/99

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On September 17, 1999 at 12:26:51, Owen Lyne wrote:

>Ah - but Bob rejects that due to what happens when you are wring. You've perhaps
>serahced some useless move (and wasted time/cycles doing it) before using
>some history/killer or some such good move, which would have cut off and saved
>all that effort. So unless you really believe the move is good, it is perhaps
>not worth even the effort of picking the 'best' out.
>
>I do hope I got that straight... ;) Read Bob's posts in the big hash table/PV
>discussions.
>
>Owen

 Bob did experimenting with his 'lazy eval' being too lazy and totally
anti-fail-soft. What it did - it returned alpha on absolutely worse moves (like
losing a piece), which denies purpose of fail soft - that move would get to
hashtable and screw branching factor instead of improving it.
 If, however, BF would improve with lazy eval turned off (or returning something
other then alpha maybe), then only question is - at which ply fail-soft
improvement of BF offsets speedup of lazy eval (and with what HT sizes). For
each program/qsearch implementation the answer can be *totally* different: most
likely the lower your flip rate for 'all' nodes from ply to ply (only those
'flipping nodes' are of our interest here) - the less improvement in move
ordering expected... ymmv, as usual :)

 One more loose remark here: while our node on previous search failed low (means
all moves were searched and returned < alpha) it may be interesting to try *all*
captures at the end - most likely no easy capture will fail high now... or at
least do killers/history moves before any captures. Which can be an interesting
thing to experiment with...

-Andrew-

P.S. below is the line from crafty lazy eval code:

 if (tscore+largest_positional_score<= alpha) return(alpha);

 To improve fail-soft scores with lazy eval, one may try changing that to
something like return(tscore+largest_positional_score).





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