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Subject: Re: Question: Fail High then Low at Root

Author: José Carlos

Date: 03:38:36 12/29/99

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On December 28, 1999 at 10:02:23, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On December 28, 1999 at 01:38:49, William Bryant wrote:
>
>>I looked at this a year ago, but want to again ask the best way to handle
>>this situation.
>>
>>You fail high at the root,
>>	increase alpha to beta -1
>>	increase beta to Mate (or Mate - 1 depending upon how these are defined)
>>Then you fail low on the same move.
>>
>>What I have been doing is accepting the fail high as correct,
>>	making this the PV move,
>>	and continuing the search at the next iteration with
>>	a window set around alpha which is the old beta -1, + or - the aspiration
>>	window size.
>>
>>Is this correct, is there a better way to handle a fail high/low.
>>
>>Thanks
>>
>>William
>>wbryant@ix.netcom.com
>
>
>I have two cases.  (don't forget I use PVS).
>
>1.  get a value for first root move as normal, then a later move fails high
>on the null-window search, but when I re-search with the normal PVS window,
>it now fails low.  I pretend the fail high didn't happen and keep the original
>root move.
>
>2.  A root move fails high, but then fails low on the re-search.  I keep the
>fail-high move.  You can probably eliminate the fail-low by simply searching
>with -inf,+inf, but it will be slower, and due to hash overwrites/draft problems
>this fail-high/fail-low problem will happen without this large window.  And with
>the large window you might fail high  on bound X, but get a score back that is
>< X...
>
>It is mainly an artifact of null-move search and hashing...

  I don't use null-move, but I use hashing, and I don't understand how is it
possible to get a fail-high and then a fail-low in the research due to the
hashing.
  As I understand, when I fail-high in the pvs, I get a lower-bound for the real
value of the position (I use fail-soft), so if I research with the new alfa set
to that value, I could never fail-low. Am I wrong?

  José C.



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