Author: William Bryant
Date: 18:17:29 10/18/99
I may not ask this question right, so allow me the luxury of a long winded question to try and explain the question completely. When starting a new iteration, the PV holds the best moves searched to the depth of n-1 (the previous depth). These moves form the far left (or far right?) of the search tree and make the first moves searched. Now the question, since these moves have already been searched, is there any point in stopping along the way and doing a null move until this line has been extended initially to the new depth. IE the first leaf evaluated should be at the end of the old pv, should it not. My Null move code starts checking null moves while depth is sufficient. Therefore, it will start null moves as soon as the first few moves of the pv have been made on the way to the first leaf. I empirically think that this will simply waste time because this line has already been searched, and that null moves should be postponed until after the first leaf has been searched or until the tree has been extended initially down the first branch following the pv to it's first. Am I close? Is there any advantage in doing the null moves while still following the pv to the first leaf? William wbryant@ix.netcom.com //my code idea goes like this if (pv_move) do_Null = false; pv_move is set to false as soon as search at any iteration moves beyond the bestmove phase and generates moves for the ply.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.