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.

=Base= The Null Move Observation is base of:
 * Null Move Pruning
 * Null Move Reductions
 * Fail-High Reductions
 * Razoring
 * Reverse Futility Pruning
 * Standing Pat in Quiescence Search

=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)

=Forum Posts=
 * Without the null move observation by Diogo Barardo, CCC, January 11, 2012

=References=

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