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Subject: Re: Who is the real NPS champion?

Author: blass uri

Date: 00:57:13 11/11/99

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On November 10, 1999 at 22:15:59, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On November 09, 1999 at 19:41:02, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>>On November 09, 1999 at 10:51:00, Ed Schröder wrote:
>>[snip]
>>>It's indeed more complex than that. Set [Chessknowledge = 500] and NPS
>>>will go down, set [Selective Search = 001] and NPS will drop even more.
>>>
>>>Changing one parameter in Rebel (which isn't available for the user) and
>>>NPS will go up with a factor 3-4 which means Rebel would go over 1,000,000
>>>NPS on a fast PC.
>>>
>>>The bottom line is that NPS (like ply-depth) is pretty meaningless.
>>I think that ply depth is an excellent indicator of understanding of the
>>position unless the program has bugs.  That is to say, if one program finds a
>>best move at ply 10, so will the other most of the time.  Certainly, if we have
>>a complete search (no special pruning) and two programs complete the same ply,
>>they will have very similar answers most of the time (given that the eval is
>>half-decent or better).
>>
>>If one program gets two piles deeper all the time, I think it will even beat a
>>program with a somewhat better eval.
>
>
>
>This isn't always true.  IE a null-move program using R=2 will generally search
>2 plies deeper than a program that doesn't use null-move.  And it will generally
>take 2 more plies to see some tactical shots that the R=2 searches 'hide'.  And
>then there are programs (Deep Blue comes to mind) that not only doesn't use
>null move at all, but they do extensions that the rest of us don't consider
>because of the expense.  IE they reported on "singular extensions".  I have now
>seen Hsu mention a new form of this they used, which basically says "If one
>move is clearly the best, extend a bunch, if two moves are clearly better than
>the rest, extend, but not so much..."  So their 8 ply search likely will see
>things that everybody else's 12-14 ply searches won't see.

I am not sure about everybody else because I believe that chessmaster usually
does brute force search of only few plies.

something like 4/10 is typical to chessmaster and I understand that it says that
it looks for 4 plies  brute force depth,it looks almost at everything at depth
10 plies and does a lot of extensions(can be many plies of extension)

Uri



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