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Subject: Re: next deep blue

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:54:36 01/21/00

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On January 21, 2000 at 17:22:08, Amir Ban wrote:

>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


It would seem that the _results_ would speak for themselves.  Who else has
produced results like theirs?



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