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Subject: Re: next deep blue

Author: Amir Ban

Date: 14:22:08 01/21/00

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On January 21, 2000 at 15:08:16, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 21, 2000 at 13:56:40, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>
>>On January 21, 2000 at 11:44:22, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>It would run so much slower it would get killed tactically.  Remember that their
>>>king safety included not just pawns around the king, but which pieces are
>>>attacking what squares, from long range as well as close range.  Which pieces
>>>are attacking squares close to the king, etc.  That takes a good bit of
>>>computing to discover.
>>
>>I realize that it takes a good bit of computing to discover. But I doubt it
>>takes so much that it's prohibitive. There are very successful micro programs
>>with extremely expensive evaluation functions, e.g., MChess and the King, and to
>>a lesser extent, HIARCS and Zarkov. These programs all reportedly have terms
>>similar to the ones you describe. I seriously doubt that the DB evaluation
>>function is an order of magnitude more complex than, say, MChess's...
>>
>>-Tom
>

Add Junior to the above list.


>
>But they don't take the time to find out which pieces are attacking squares
>around the king "through" another piece.  IE a bishop at b2 attacking g7, but
>only if the Nc3 moves.  Or only if the pawn on d4 or e5 moves.  That gets very
>expensive computationally.  DB gets it for nothing.  I think it would slow me
>down by a factor of 100 or more, depending on how far I wanted to take it...
>
>That might make me more aware of king attacks, but it would hide many plies
>worth of tactics since a factor of 100 is over 4 plies.  Only a wild guess
>of course on the factor of 100, but since the eval is done at every node in
>the q-search, this is probably within an order of magnitude or two of the
>real answer.
>
>I can guarantee you it is more complex than the above evaluations.  And I don't
>even know all the things they evaluate.  One new idea mentioned in Hsu's book
>was the concept of "a file that can potentially become open" so that you put
>rooks on that file, even though you can't see exactly how you are going to open
>it within the 15 plies + extensions they were searching.  "Potentially open"
>takes a lot of analysis on the static pawn structure.  I do some of this
>pawn structure analysis myself, and even with pawn hashing it slowed me down
>significantly when I added it a year+ ago to better handle/detect blocked
>positions.
>
>Remember that they claimed about 8,000 static evaluation weights in their
>code, this reported by someone that went to a DB talk by Murray Campbell.
>8000 sounds like a big number...

It's big, but what does it really mean ? Some of it must have been piece-square
tables for some features that were downloaded from the hosts, and that's
hundreds of entries per feature.

Besides, where is all this sophistication showing up in the DB & DBjr games ?
Forget the numbers, whatever they mean. Show us the positions & moves.

Amir







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