1.) Ladder analysis can be reduced to almost linear search with a few branching 
points by doing an analysis of the two liberties available. One liberty has a 
"helping stone" adjacent, and the other has no helping stone adjacent, so would 
usually lead to three liberties for the running string. A ladder analysis can 
usually be limited to just the liberty without a helping stone. The only 
branching occurs if both liberties have a helping stone. And of course, you 
must read through captures to see if there is a snapback, etc.

2). Don't know how to help there...

Ken Friedenbach

On Apr 27, 2011, at 8:23 AM, Daniel Shawul wrote:

> I am having problems making my engine play a decent game on 19x19 board. Some 
> KGS games
> exposed the following problems.
> 
> 1) Ladder problem. It often mis-evaluates ladders despite my best efforts to 
> detect them
> in the playouts. So I resorted to doing qsearch at the root to weed out moves 
> which
> loose tactically, and make winning moves immediately. That helped but 
> sometimes the qsearch explodes and engine looses on time.
> I tried putting a limit to the depth of qsearch but it still runs into 
> problems. Using a small depth limit may
> help in 9x9 but on 19x19, atleast 40 plies is required to detect one ladder 
> along the diagonal... so what to do ?
> 
> 2) My second problem concerns use of progressive widening/unpruning which 
> looks like a must to have on 19x19.
> The problem I have is with the move ordering... If I tell it to  moves on the 
> 3rd line from the edge are good ones, 
> it continually puts its stones on that line (hence forming a square), while 
> the opponent controls the centre and also
> cuts some parts of the 3rd line. 
> Then I used fillboard to try and fix this issue, but the engine once again 
> tends to prefer these moves and put stones
> all over the board. Which is when I realized it is impossible to fix it with 
> static move ordering.
> Should I use something dynamic like RAVE to order the moves? That will be 
> inconvinient  because I order the nodes 
> only during first allocation. 
> Also the default progressive unpruning formula seems to select too few moves 
> for consideration, so I had to add 20 additional moves
> to make it work for my engine.
> 
> 
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Ken Friedenbach
[email protected]
http://web.me.com/kenliz/Memoirs/Welcome.html

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