It is interesting that 16 moves of once-branched play is worth something
like 3 stones. We will continue to gather statistics to find out.
This form of search, deep analyses of single lines of play, I have called
"playout analysis" <http://satirist.org/learn-game/inspire/playout.html>,
by analogy to the "rollout analysis" done by backgammon programs.
Nice to have a name for it. This is one of the ideas I've used in my own
program after observing Many Faces: if you set it to play itself out to the
end of the game on one of the low levels it takes just a couple of seconds
but gives a more accurate score than pressing F9 to get current score estimate.