Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Sep 8, 2019 12:03 AM UTC:
Wow, QS explosion is a serious problem. Now that I have allowed all check evasions in the QSearch, I have my search stack overflowing very quickly in Gross Chess and my stack supports a depth of 128! After four plies of QS it considers only recaptures and check evasions and I still had over a HUNDRED plies. I figured something had to be broken with my 3-fold repetition detection, but not so... In Gross Chess you can literally have over a hundred consecutive moves of nothing by check evasions and recaptures to the last square without triggering repetition. I would not have thought it possible had I not spent a couple hours manually stepping though about 50 plies until I was convinced it was for real. (It has a lot to do with the cannons - you can often escape check by moving into the path of your own cannon to become a screen and check the opponent king.)
So I appreciate your previous message or I would probably have been at a loss as to what to do about this. I've now switched to this: first four plies of QS are all captures and check evasions; after four plies it switches to only recaptures and check evasions; after eight plies of QS it starts to allow standing pat even when in check (returning the static evaluation rather than -INFINITY.) This has stopped the search explosion. I'm now running a 1600 game Capablanca match against FairyMax to ensure this doesn't hurt my search strength too much. (Seeing as most games don't have the kind of search explosion problems that Gross does but I'd like to keep the search function the same across games if possible.)
Wow, QS explosion is a serious problem. Now that I have allowed all check evasions in the QSearch, I have my search stack overflowing very quickly in Gross Chess and my stack supports a depth of 128! After four plies of QS it considers only recaptures and check evasions and I still had over a HUNDRED plies. I figured something had to be broken with my 3-fold repetition detection, but not so... In Gross Chess you can literally have over a hundred consecutive moves of nothing by check evasions and recaptures to the last square without triggering repetition. I would not have thought it possible had I not spent a couple hours manually stepping though about 50 plies until I was convinced it was for real. (It has a lot to do with the cannons - you can often escape check by moving into the path of your own cannon to become a screen and check the opponent king.)
So I appreciate your previous message or I would probably have been at a loss as to what to do about this. I've now switched to this: first four plies of QS are all captures and check evasions; after four plies it switches to only recaptures and check evasions; after eight plies of QS it starts to allow standing pat even when in check (returning the static evaluation rather than -INFINITY.) This has stopped the search explosion. I'm now running a 1600 game Capablanca match against FairyMax to ensure this doesn't hurt my search strength too much. (Seeing as most games don't have the kind of search explosion problems that Gross does but I'd like to keep the search function the same across games if possible.)