"Good ideas" that may not work

[Henk]

In my chess program I tried out several "good ideas" that did not improve performance:

1) Mate distance pruning
2) Futility pruning in Quiescence search
3) LMR
4) Hash table ( This I have to try out again)


Are there more good ideas that may not work ?

I like to have warnings in advance.

[yolin]

I can give you a general warning: Anything that is implemented badly might 'not work'.

[Henk]

In my chess program I tried out several "good ideas" that did not improve performance:

1) Mate distance pruning
2) Futility pruning in Quiescence search
3) LMR
4) Hash table ( This I have to try out again)


Are there more good ideas that may not work ?

I like to have warnings in advance.

5) History heuristic (not killer moves)
6) lazy evaluation when normal evaluation is fast enough
7) alfa beta instead of pvs

[Henk]

In my chess program I tried out several "good ideas" that did not improve performance:

1) Mate distance pruning
2) Futility pruning in Quiescence search
3) LMR
4) Hash table ( This I have to try out again)


Are there more good ideas that may not work ?

I like to have warnings in advance.

5) History heuristic (not killer moves)
6) lazy evaluation when normal evaluation is fast enough
7) alfa beta instead of pvs

8) MTD(f)
9) Aspiration windows

[velmarin]

You are very hard on your engine.

Something worked, or not.

[zullil]

I can give you a general warning: Anything that is implemented badly might 'not work'.

[Henk]

I can give you a general warning: Anything that is implemented badly might 'not work'.

Some combinations of good ideas may not work

[lucasart]

In my chess program I tried out several "good ideas" that did not improve performance:

1) Mate distance pruning
2) Futility pruning in Quiescence search
3) LMR
4) Hash table ( This I have to try out again)


Are there more good ideas that may not work ?

I like to have warnings in advance.

5) History heuristic (not killer moves)
6) lazy evaluation when normal evaluation is fast enough
7) alfa beta instead of pvs

In my experience, all of these things, if implemented correctly, work. Except perhaps lazy eval.

There's no point even discussing it. The proof is in the pudding.

Instead of trying everything at once, and giving up because it doesn't work, you need to be more patient and scientific about it. Do one thing and do it right, and debug and fix it until you understand it thouroughlly, and you will see what is wrong with your implementation.

You need to start from the basics, and get alpha/beta + hash table to work correctly, and really test it, before you try anything else.

[jdart]

If implementing a hash table does not give you a performance increase, then you are certainly doing it wrong.

(It is fairly easy to get this wrong. Look at a simple example like MSCP - http://marcelk.net/mscp/ - to see how to do it).

[Tom Likens]

In my chess program I tried out several "good ideas" that did not improve performance:

1) Mate distance pruning
2) Futility pruning in Quiescence search
3) LMR
4) Hash table ( This I have to try out again)


Are there more good ideas that may not work ?

I like to have warnings in advance.

Hmm, perhaps your list of things that did work would be more interesting.
BTW, what is the name of your program?