End Of The Line

[Mike Sherwin]

How much search depth is enough. The simple answer there is no such thing, at least not today. But the simple answer is not true. The truth is that the vast majority of lines do not benefit at all by searching deeper. We are stuck in the days of slow CPUs. In those days not so many lines were exhausted way before the horizon. However, on today's CPUs many lines are processed far in excess of what they need to be. Even many reduced lines are calculated deeper than they need to be. What we need to start working on are techniques that will hard terminate a line at any arbitrary depth and to put those positions in the TT with max depth so they will always return a score. One might say this was tried for decades and it did not work. But that was on slow machines where it could not work. So it was mostly given up on. I'm thinking that we need to take another look.