Testing procedure

Discussion of chess software programming and technical issues.

Moderators: hgm, Rebel, chrisw

diep
Posts: 1822
Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2006 11:54 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Testing procedure

Post by diep »

Tord Romstad wrote:
mcostalba wrote:Returning to your ultra fast idea: it is indeed _almost_ the best thing but you have to be careful. As a trivial example consider selective search. Futility pruning in Glaurung starts at ply 7 and more or less is the same with Cyclone. So if your ultra fast search does not reach at least ply 9-10 and change you are testing is about futility then you can get artifacts with ultra fast games.
I used to think so, too.

One of the biggest surprises I got when porting my program to the iPhone was how little I had to tune the selective search to the slow CPU. On the iPhone, I get only around 8 plies on average in the middle game, and I thought the search would fall apart totally when using 7 plies of aggressive, dubious forward pruning. To my surprise, it turned out to work just as well as on fast computers. Pruning more conservatively or reducing the limit from 7 plies to a lower number made the program play worse.
I suggest at iphone to prune a lot more than you do now. Getting that 10 ply is important, no matter how much you need to prune.

Above that things change.

Maybe Ed Schroder who got 10-11 ply around 1991 at say 10Mhz type hardware (RISC) wants to share publicly how he did do it.

It isn't clearly on his homepage how he did do it.

When i experimented with Ed's form of tactical search, it tactical destroyed any other thing on planet earth that version at the time.

Vincent