Not being lazy anymore

Lazy evaluation describes a technique where an engine does not do a full evaluation of a certain position but does only a rough estimate.

Lets say the engine knows already it has a line where it will even with best play of the opponent end with a pawn up (+1.00). Now it considers a different line where already the basic material evaluation shows that it is a rook down (-5.00). Now the engine can save time, because it does not really need to know what the influence of other factors in that position like mobility, space, open file coverage, weak pawns etc. is. All those will not compensate the loss of a rook so the engine will not play that line anyway.

This sounds like a simple and smart concept and some well known engines use it. It really speeds up the evaluation, so nps (evaluated nodes per seconds) goes up. But there is no free lunch. The problem is to pick the right safety margin. In the above example the safety margin was more than a rook, this is pretty safe. But with such a big margin you have only few cases where you can apply lazy eval. If you shrink the margin you have more and more cases for lazy eval, but so also increases the danger that you will miss stuff. 

My experiences where that while lazy eval increases the raw speed of the engine it also increases the amount of work the engine has to do to reach the same quality. In terms of time it was about even.

So far in iCE I had a very limited form of lazy eval. The safety margin was between a rook and a queen. This seemed to help overall a little but I always disliked it.

So I recently tested the complete removal again. And after 16.000 games both versions were equal. Considering the error margin removing the feature can still lose about 5 ELO in the worst case but I'm willing to take that risk.

Safety first.