Author: Jeremiah Penery
Date: 04:23:03 11/07/99
Go up one level in this thread
On November 06, 1999 at 07:19:19, Dan Homan wrote:
>Ok, your standard null-move code looks something like this....
>
> search(position current, int alpha, int beta, int depth) {
>
> .....
> position next;
> int score;
>
> /* null move */
> if( /* conditions to decide if null-move is appropriate */ ) {
> next = makeNull(current);
> if(depth >= R+1) {
> score = -search(next, -beta, -beta+1, depth-R-1);
> } else {
> score = -Qsearch(next, -beta, -beta+1);
> }
> if(score >= beta) return(beta);
> }
>
> .....
>
> }
>
>I simply modified the null move code to look like
>
> /* null move */
> if( /* conditions to decide if null-move is appropriate */ ) {
> next = makeNull(current);
> if(depth >= R+1) {
> score = -search(next, -beta, -beta+1, depth-R-1);
> } else {
> score = -Qsearch(next, -beta, -beta+1);
> }
> /* verification search */
> if(score >= beta && depth >= R+1) {
> next = current;
> set flag for no null move on next search;
> score = search(next, beta-1, beta, depth-R-1);
> }
> if(score >= beta) return(beta);
> }
>
>You can see that the verification search is just 3 or 4 lines of code.
>All it does is search the current position to a reduced depth with
>no null move.... this only happens when the null move is going to force
>a fail high, and it should confirm that we are not in zug. The time spent
>doing these verification searches is very small, so I think this might
>be a good addition. I still have to do tests on those positions you
>posted.
Trying to get this to work in Crafty, I tried several things. Unfortunately,
none of them worked.
First, I tried what you did above. I think it was performing some verification
searches, because it was slower than normal, but I never got a different
move/score from normal. With this scheme I was also getting "bad move from hash
table" errors. :(
Then I tried to do two separate searches - The normal null-move search, and then
a reduced-depth non-null move search, when the depth is low enough already (so
it wouldn't take too much time), then use the non-null score if it differs from
the other one. This also didn't work. Results about the same as above, but no
errors.
I tried to implement double null-move, but I couldn't figure out how to make
this work properly, either. I may work on this some more, since I only tried a
couple different things.
The only thing I've found that works so far is to simply turn off null-move
below a certain depth. Of course, this slows down the search a bunch, though.
Any other ideas on what I can try? I really would like to make this idea, or a
similar one, work, because it's a good one. :)
Jeremiah
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