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ChessVA computer program
. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
📝Greg Strong wrote on Mon, Sep 4, 2006 08:26 PM UTC:
Dan: You don't need to restrict moves; it is just a way to save time. You don't need to calculate every move to some really deep depth if you know that move of them are definitely bad (like pushing edge pawns.) So, it goes something like this... select 'test this position' - set I-Depth to something like 5, and set the maximum number of moves to a big number (like 100) so that everything will be tested. Click ok, and then be patient ... What it is doing is making each move and then running an I-Depth 5 search on the resulting position to determine a value for this move. Then it undoes that move and tries the next. When it is done it will present a list of all moves tested, and the resulting evaluation. A depth-5 search isn't deep enough to determine which moves are the best, but it is good enough to rule out really bad moves. Then, to test the 'good' moves to a deeper depth, select 'test this position' again. Turn up the depth, limit the moves to the top 12 or so, and click ok. Then repeat it again, testing the top 6 positions or so to a depth of 9 or greater. When it completes, any moves which are within 50 points or so of the best move should be added to the opening book. Of course, you could just test all moves to a depth of 9 from the start, but that wastes a LOT of time. The 'test this position' search uses a more intensive search in several ways than the normal search to ensure the best results. But this means that it is quite slow. If your computer has a lot of ram, before you start testing, change the computer settings, and allocate more memory for the transposition table and evaluation cache. If you allocate more memory than you can spare, though, the operating system will start swapping to disk, and that will slow things down to a crawl, so use the task manager to check your free physical memory first. Any more than 512MB for the transposition table is totally pointless, and any more than 256MB for the evaluation cache is probably pointless. Also, when setting the table sizes, use powers of two. The size of the tables must be a power of two, so if you enter 100MB, ChessV is just going to round it down to 64.