Earlier this week I implemented aspiration windows to chess4j. It’s a very simple concept. In the iterative deepening loop, the depth 1 iteration is processed as usual, with an alpha bound of “negative infinity” and a beta bound of “infinity.” On subsequent iterations, the alpha bound is initialized to the previous score minus some margin (1/3 pawn in this case), and the beta bound is initialized to the previous score plus some margin (again, 1/3 pawn). If all goes well, and the score is within those bounds, the search should finish faster as there are more cutoffs. However, if the real score is not within that search window, then a research must be done.

My intention was to start with the 1/3 pawn windows, falling back to a “wide open” search if it fails. Once testing confirmed that was a win, I could play with the margins or incrementally expanding the window. Unfortunately, this was a pretty fast fail.

My first run was terminated after 2002 games, and the second after 2965 games.

Wins	Losses	Draws	Pct	Elo	Error
549	689	763	46.5%	-24.5	12.0
886	1026	1053	47.6%	-16.4	10.0

I did expect this to be a win so I’m a little puzzled by the result, but that’s why we test. Perhaps when the search matures a little more and can hit deeper depths the scores between iterations will stabilize ? I’ll just queue this up to revisit later on.

On the plus side, SPRT saved a lot of time by terminating a 20,000 game match after 2-3k games. That’s a big time saver.

On to PVS.