Manual de Fritz 15 2015 | Page 162

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Fritz 15 Help

The first is the search depth, with a default of "5". This controls how far ahead (in
half-moves, or "plies") the engine will look before making a move. For example, if you
leave this at "5", the engine will look 2.5 moves ahead before making a move.
Remember, the engine is going to be playing a lot of games against itself and storing
the moves in the form of a tree, so the search depth is important. You must realize,
however, that there's something of a tradeoff here; the higher you set the search
depth, the more time the engine will need to make each move -- so you're trading time
for depth. On the other hand, setting a lower search depth means that many more
games will be played in a given amount of time, but that the moves themselves are
likely to be more superficial.
Keep in mind, too, that you should use only odd numbers for the search depth,
because chess engines tend to develop a tactical "blind spot" when made to analyze
at even ply depths. Rule of thumb: odd numbers good, even numbers bad.
The second setting is the "width" of the tree. This is similar in some ways to the
"Branching factor" in Deep Position Analysis and is another "space for time" tradeoff. If
you create a "Narrow" tree, you won't see many alternative moves displayed in your
game tree but the overall process of playing games and generating the tree will be
faster. "Broad" trees show more alternatives but take longer to generate (it requires
more processor time and thus slows down the chess engine).

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