Null Move Observation

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Null Move Observation,

the observation that for the side to move there is almost always a better alternative ( move) than doing nothing. The Null Move Observation might be considered as tempo bonus in evaluation, but it fails in Zugzwang situations.

Publications

Gordon Goetsch , Murray Campbell (1988). Experimenting with the Null Move Heuristic in Chess. AAAI Spring Symposium Proceedings, pp. 14-18.
Don Beal (1989). Experiments with the Null Move. Advances in Computer Chess 5, a revised version is published (1990) under the title A Generalized Quiescence Search Algorithm. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 85-98. ISSN 0004-3702, edited version in (1999). The Nature of MINIMAX Search. Ph.D. thesis, IKAT, ISBN 90-62-16-6348. Chapter 10, pp. 101-116
Don Beal (1990). A Generalized Quiescence Search Algorithm. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 85-98. ISSN 0004-3702
Rainer Feldmann (1997). Fail-High Reductions. Advances in Computer Chess 8, available as pdf from CiteSeerX
Don Beal (2006). Review of a nullmove-quiescence search mechanism from 1986. File:Alg1986review.txt (Draft) [2]