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Subject: Re: next deep blue

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 14:34:41 01/25/00

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On January 25, 2000 at 15:51:54, Ernst A. Heinz wrote:

>On January 25, 2000 at 15:35:58, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>Hsu mentioned "we disabled the futility pruning in the q-search which slowed
>>the
>>chip by a factor of 10..."  Most noticed the factor of 10.  _I_ noticed the
>>"we disabled the futility pruning".  Because Hsu and I had had a _long_
>>discussion about this in r.g.c a few years back.  I ran a bunch of tests using
>>SEE, MVV/LVA and SEE+futility, and posted the results.  Apparently he liked the
>>data and implemented this quietly.
>
>As far as I know, Hsu was always convinced that MVV/LVA with
>futility pruning in the quiescence search was the right way
>to go -- he already wrote about it in his Ph.D. thesis. Even
>"ChipTest" did it exactly like this I suppose.
>

So far as I know, he didn't do futility pruning in the q-search.  When we had
the original discussion in r.g.c, I mentioned that SEE was making my code in
Crafty (and Cray Blitz since I did it the same way there) over 50% faster than
pure MVV/LVA ordering.  He asked for details.  At that point, I realized that
there were two distinct issues: (1) ordering moves with SEE vs MVV/LVA.  (2) I
was doing a type of futility pruning (tossing out captures that were hopeless.)

I then reworded my note and tried tests.  I first found that SEE was about 10%
better than MVV/LVA, looking at the tree size.  And since SEE was pretty cheap
in bitboards, overall it was faster as well.  I then found that tossing bum
captures was a 50% gain.  He thought that would cause problems.  We had a long
discussion, with several test positions.

I can certainly be wrong about whether he used it or not, but he certainly
said that he was looking at _all_ captures at the time of the discussion which
was somewhere around 1993-1994...

So his doing some sort of futility tossing was a surprise to me...  I didn't
notice this in his thesis as I was more interested in the parallel search stuff.


>So, no surprises here. He did not implement anything quietly.
>
>>We learned something about DB (or at least
>>I did) in this simple discussion...
>
>Not really anything  new ... unfortunately (see above).
>
>=Ernst=


Not even the branching factor?




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