Simple question. Did the idea go away over time or is it getting more
attractive again as processing power increases ?
Obviously Ed could comment on that ;-)
-- Peter
Rebel does not use Singular Extensions anymore.
The loss of speed was to high even when I implemented the idea in a faster
way WITHOUT the "research" part (Just marking moves in the hash table as
singular and extending [ply++] in the *NEXT* iteration!)
Has anyone used this idea also?
Results?
Maybe the idea is interesting again since we have fast machines now.
- Ed Schroder -
At first blush, this would seem to be somewhat different than singular
extensions. First, what if this move doesn't test "singular" when you
get to ply+1, you still extend because you aren't testing it there? Second,
what if it's singular *now* and you don't get to ply+1 to extend it, then
you get no information.
I'm not saying this is good, bad, or indifferent, just that it's
"different." I plan on playing with it again after Jakarta, just
to see what it does with newer hardware speeds...
: Results?
:
: Maybe the idea is interesting again since we have fast machines now.
:
The sad thing is that everything changes every two years or so. :)
: - Ed Schroder -
>Rebel does not use Singular Extensions anymore.
>The loss of speed was to high even when I implemented the idea in a faster
>way WITHOUT the "research" part (Just marking moves in the hash table as
>singular and extending [ply++] in the *NEXT* iteration!)
>Has anyone used this idea also?
>Results?
I've had a similar experience in Chinook (checkers). "Pure" singular
extensions resulted in too much search overhead. Instead I implemented
a "modified" algorithm that included some shortcuts for finding singular
moves, marked them in the hash table and used the singularity informaiton
on the next iteration to extend the search.
I did some extensive experiments with this two years ago and concluded
that for checkers it was a win:
- the "modified" singular extensions program beat one not using it by a
reasonable margin
- the "pure" verison was a big loser: the trees were too large.