Russell Sherwood Sunday, September 4, 2022
One of the most commonly misunderstood things, in CC, is engine ply depth.
When an engine indicates, it has searched to up to a specific depth (say D70) - this does not mean it has checked every move up to that depth, it means that the mainline has gone this deep.
This means that the result given is probably a good line, but not necessarily the best, as the result is achieved by pruning the search tree - a process where more promising lines are search and less promising ones pruned from the search.
What is interesting here is that all the Engine spin-offs that are interesting for CC, are ones which modify the search function of Stockfish as these days the non trivial wins tend to be from the side-lines!
CorrespondenceChessEngineChessTipoftheWeekWCCF
