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Subject: Re: NULL move question

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 15:05:06 01/20/00

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On January 20, 2000 at 16:35:53, Ricardo Gibert wrote:

>On January 20, 2000 at 15:06:36, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>
>>On January 19, 2000 at 21:01:47, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On January 19, 2000 at 19:24:37, Ricardo Gibert wrote:
>>>
>>>>[snip]
>>
>>
>>>Feel free to refute this...  but please do so with data rather than opinion.
>>>It is easy to produce...
>>
>>It is also easy to hack crafty to check for null move failures. At the point in
>>the code where you exit on null move cutoff, just set a flag and continue. Then,
>>after you do the full search, if the null move would have produced a cutoff, and
>> the full search did not, you have a null move failure.
>
>You don't need to do this. You can save yourself the trouble by noting that in
>say for example in a particular game, null move is effective up to about move 60
>by going 10 ply, then you would expect null move to be effective up to about
>move 55 by going 20 ply instead. Null move loses its effectiveness for about 8%
>of those 60 moves. You don't need to consider the fact you are searching with
>incrementally increasing depth, since the searches at lower depths are a drop in
>the bucket compared to 20 ply search. So it is reasonable to surmise that with
>an increase in search depth of 10 to 20, null move will lose its effectiveness
>for a small, but significant percentage of the positions encountered in a game.
>
>Any test you do will probably reflect something like this, so why bother?


Perhaps because it doesn't always work that way?  Suppose you have checks to
prevent doing null-moves in some positions.  Then starting in a position where
you will reach more of those positions as you go deeper does _not_ hurt the
program, since it simply avoids doing the null-move search when it shouldn't
do it.




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