Improving move ordering has been on the radar of a while now. I started to suspect that move ordering needed some work when my initial attempts at a PVS search and aspiration windows both failed. I reasoned that, if move ordering is subpar, researches would occur too often causing an overall increase in node counts.

To know, you have to measure, so I added data to the logfiles and wrote a Python script to aggregate (1) time to depth, (2) effective branching factor, and (3) the % of nodes in which we get a fail high on the 1st move and first four moves.

Once I was able to measure, I changed the move ordering scheme FROM:

PV move -> Hash move -> All captures in MVV/LVA order -> Killer 1 -> Killer 2 -> noncaptures in the order they are generated

TO:

PV move -> Hash Move -> “Good captures” in MVV/LVA order -> Killer 1 -> Killer 2 -> noncaptures -> bad captures in SEE order.

A “good capture” is one that is a promotion, a capture in which the value of the captured piece is at least that of the capturing piece, or one with a non-negative SEE value.

Incidentally, while researching this I came across a post I myself had made many years ago: http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=15198&hilit=defer+losing+captures&sid=5543f43760ce939ed16deacd59710e06

The change doesn’t seem to add more than just a couple of ELO directly. However, in non-tactical test suites all the measured metrics were improved: time to solution is down, effective branching factor is lower, the percentage of fail highs on the first move is improved, and the percentage of fail highs in the first four moves is dramatically improved. Additionally, the number of nodes required to reach a solution is cut by about a third, with only a 7% or so decrease in speed (nodes per second). I believe this sets the stage to take another stab at PVS and aspiration windows. First though, I’m going to take a stab at pruning bad captures from the quiescence search.

One potential (probable) area of improvement is that knights and bishops have slightly different values (bishops being the more valuable). For the purposes of determining if a capture is “good” when classifying the captures, they should probably be considered equal.