Author: Jeremiah Penery
Date: 11:40:57 01/25/00
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On January 25, 2000 at 14:02:01, Christophe Theron wrote: >Actually many programs prove everyday that using an imperfect pruning scheme is >much better than no pruning at all. Yours included (I don't mean your pruning is >imperfect). > >I see no reason to believe that this would change just because you are be able >to compute 4, 5 or even 10 plies deeper. > >Is it really still debatable? It was maybe, 20 years ago, but now we all know >the answer... <snip> >My main point is that not using a pruning scheme is somewhat... stup... >Ahem... not really optimal. <snip> >But I'm sorry, not using any pruning scheme, if it is really what they did, >sounds like a "political" decision. I cannot believe that Hsu is stupid enough >to really believe that DB plays better without pruning. > >It is either a huge professional mistake or a deliberate public relations >choice. You guess. <snip> >OK, he had all this power as a result of his very hard work. So he deserved it. >But the total package could have been much better with a pruning scheme. The >thing that has played against Kasparov was far from being finished. Even the best selective-search algorithm will sometimes cause you to play a different move than you would without it. You will 'miss something', so to speak. If you were writing a program to play against arguably the best chess player _ever_, would you want to risk this happening even once and losing because of it? Especially if you had the speed not to really worry about it, as they did. Also, it may have been a matter of time. Since there was little time to do much testing, it would've been way too hard to write and debug a good selective search algorithm. They had other problems to worry about. In effect, they did do a bit of selective search, through their extensions. You could call their search a highly-selective 30-ply+ search. :) They just were not selective in the first part of the search. I do agree that they may have been a bit better if they had some sort of selective search, however. I just don't think it was practical or really important for them to worry about. Jeremiah
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