--- In abalone_prog@yahoogroups.com, david.malek@f... wrote:
>
> I read the search algortihm, no hash, nothing special but pure
alpha beta, so i
> wonderred about speed. But the evaluation functions part needs more
> investigation.
>
> In fact, I tried to select only a few moves in MLA, and i was
proven wrong
> against MLA without the pruning.
>
> So i'm looking forward to see a program play good by picking lony a
few moves by
> looking 2 moves ahead at node level at any level. This would really
make me
> question my tests.

As I recall this "fixed-move-count" search was made popular by the
famous "Chess" program that dominated computer chess 1970-1980, but
modern chess programs uses recursive null move pruning which is
tactically superior. I would expect the same to be true in Abalone.

AbaPro does a 1-ply search before pruning leaves, but has no limit on
the number of moves examined. Tax 2.0 apparently does a 1 or 2 ply
search, and then examines only 6 moves at full depth.

The greater the difference between prune-depth and search-depth the
more tactical weakness I would expect. Thus at 8 ply the difference
would be 6 ply for Tax .. leading to several tactical weaknesses. At
8 ply a recursive null move search does a 6 ply test, thus only 2 ply
difference. The greater the search depth, the greater advantage I
would expect with recursive null move pruning.

Just for the record: The very first versions of Nacre also used a
variant of "fixed-move-count", and my experience was also that it was
better to do a less deep but full width search. The present version
of Nacre uses a variant of recursive null-move search.