Tweaking the book generator

I was in the alps on my winter holiday for the past two weeks, and used the times in between skiing (when my knee hurt...) to tweak my book generator a bit. I knew of two lines in the book generator that were not what they should be. The first one goes like this:

1. 11-16 22-18 2. 10-14 25-22 3. 8-11 24-20

My openings database thinks that 8-11 is a big mistake because of 24-20 - because red must play 4. 16-19, sacrificing a man to draw. Now, if this 4. 16-19 line was expanded just a couple of moves further, it would play into the white doctor opening (1. 10-14 22-18 2. 12-16 24-20, and now 3. 16-19 is required to draw), which is in the book as a draw. However, this line is not expanded further because of the way the book generation works: if a move is thought to be clearly inferior, then it is not expanded any deeper, or only much later than the best move. In this example, 3. 7-10 is recognized as a draw, and therefore 3. 8-11 never got expanded much further. In a way, this is no serious error in the book, because it is meant only to find sound lines, and if you know one way to draw you don't need another. On the other hand, I would like my book to be a reference which checkers players can trust (once I publish it...), and if it doesn't know about this line, then people could easily be disappointed. The simplest fix to this problem is to tell the book generator to expand this specific line more deeply. This is also a very stupid approach, because the fact that the generator didn't expand this line is telling me that there may be other similar lines that it didn't expand and which would be worthy of expansion too. With over 2 million positions in the book, there is no way for me to check everything, so I have to make sure that whatever fix I make, it will affect the way that this line and others like it are expanded after the fix. In this case, I decided to penalize mistakes on the first 10 moves less than on later moves, causing an earlier expansion of the line above. I wanted the transition to be somewhat smooth so I used a weight of 0.05*depth + 0.5 with which I multiply the penalty for errors on the first 10 moves; for later moves the weight is 1.0. This change has had the desired effect: The line in question is now going to be expanded soon.

There is another line which I had to find a fix for, where even my 2-million-moves book still had a losing move in the book. It's a longer story so I'll keep that for my next post!