Author: Heiko Mikala
Date: 14:54:08 10/29/99
Go up one level in this thread
Hello Ed!
On October 29, 1999 at 15:55:41, Ed Schröder wrote:
>>Posted by Robert Hyatt on October 29, 1999 at 13:11:33:
>>
>>The thing that Ed is missing is this: I was doing this in 1970. He hadn't
>>even thought about computer chess in 1970.
>
>The first program who had null-move (in the it is used now!) was the one
>of Don Beal during the WCC Cologne 1986, I remember it very well. And that
>moment Don had null-move only in Q-search. After Cologne his article
>"Selective Search without tears" came.
>
>Frans Morsch immediately fell in love with null-move after Cologne 1986
>because of this talks with Don. In that time Frans and I almost daily phoned
>each other to discuss computer chess programming and exchanged many ideas. I
>decided not to use null-move, Frans did, you can see the result in Fritz.
>
>Then after some years the Donninger null-move article came in the ICCA, I
>forgot about the year, maybe someone can have a look, and the ball got
>rolling. I clearly remember the heated discussions in RGCC in 1995. From
>that moment on null-move (using it as selective search) became kind of
>standard in chess programs.
>
>Frans Morsch and Chrilly Donninger gave you null-move in the way it is used
>now in chess programs. There is no single doubt on that.
>
No Ed, this is not true.
I have been using Null-Move in my own program for many years, long before I
heard that Chrilly Donninger had published something about it. Even long before
I heard the name Donninger for the first time.
I have been writing on my own chess program for more than ten years, only as a
hobby. I do not fully remember, when I used null move for the first time (would
have to search through my old sources which I hope I still have somewhere - and
hopefully not on a 5.25 disk ;-), but for a very long time I used Null-Move with
a depth reduction of 1 and non-recursive, because r=2 and recursive would have
killed me on the 80286/80386 computers. But I already knew about r=2 and
recursive Null-Move.
Now here comes something interesting for this debate. In the early days of my
chess program I started to make comments on top of my sources, mentioning from
where I got my ideas (just like Bob does in Crafty). Unfortunately I stopped
that, but fortunately this is the start of the comment in my search-function
code:
/****************************************************************************/
/* Bibliographie: */
/* ============== */
/* */
/* - NULL-MOVE Heuristik: */
/* -------------------- */
/* "Experiments with the Null-Move Heuristic", G.Goetsch, M.S.Campbell */
/* in: 'Computers, Chess, and Cognition' von Marsland/Schaeffer */
/* S.159-168, Springer Verlag, (1990) */
/* */
/* - PVS (minimal window Principal Variation Search) */
/* ------------------------------------------------------------ */
/* "Computer Chess Methods", T.A. Marsland */
/* in: 'Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence', Vol.1 */
/* S.159-171, (1987) - PVS: S.162/163 ("minimal window search") */
So I got my ideas from Goetsch and Campbell, from reading the book "Computers,
Chess and Cognition" which was published in 1990. I have it right here in my
hands, and it says on the bottom of page 159: "An earlier version of this
chapter appeared in the 1988 AAAI Spring Symposium Proceedings, pp. 14-18"
One more point (hey Bob, don't you remember this?!?): In the same book there is
an article about Cray Blitz, pp. 111-130, and starting on page 112 there is a
paragraph called "7.2.2.1 Null Move". It describes the null-move in exactly the
same way as it is used today!
I may well have learned about the null-move before this book was published,
because at that time I used to spend hours in our Universities library,
searching through all the artificial intelligence journals and books I could get
my hands on, to find some more informations about chess programming (it was
really hard at that time to find informations about chess programming - but I'm
sure you know that even better than I do :-)
About Frans Morsch: He may well have been the first one, who used null-move
succcessfully in a commercial program. I bought Fritz 1.0 when it came out
(still a dos-program then of course, and sold by a company called "boeder" at
that time, not chessbase) and still have it on my hard disk, so I just had a
look and it is dated from 1991. I do remember that everyone wondered at that
time how a chess program can be so fast and reach such deep search depths at the
hardware that was used in these days. I guess he was already using null-move at
that time, but at least I'm pretty sure that he used it in Fritz 2 which was
again a bit faster IIRC. But there were others who used it earlier or at least
at the same time as Frans. Not only Don Beal.
By the way, thanks for your development of Rebel. I love it!
Greetings,
Heiko.
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