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Subject: Re: EGTB: Until what depth ?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 10:00:35 03/30/01

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On March 30, 2001 at 12:28:20, Christophe Theron wrote:

>On March 30, 2001 at 09:30:06, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On March 29, 2001 at 13:31:59, Christophe Theron wrote:
>>
>>>On March 29, 2001 at 09:14:57, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>On March 29, 2001 at 06:22:13, Jouni Uski wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On March 29, 2001 at 06:17:50, Alexander Kure wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On March 29, 2001 at 04:37:19, Tony Werten wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Hi all,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>until what depth do various programs probe the tablebases ?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>cheers,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Tony
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Hi Tony,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>In London 2000, I let Nimzo 8 play with a depth of 6 plies, but later I came to
>>>>>>the conclusion that 8 plies might be better overall. This is indeed the default
>>>>>>setting of NimzoX and Varguz playing on ICC.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Greetings
>>>>>>Alex
>>>>>
>>>>>Sorry one stupid question: is this the first or last 6/8 plys?
>>>>>
>>>>>Jouni
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>His statement would make no sense if it were the _last_ 6-8 plies.  Those
>>>>are the ones that kill performance if you aren't careful.  The first 6-8 plies
>>>>don't cost a thing.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>But it could also mean it probes TBs in all the plies except the last 6/8.
>>>
>>>Meaning that if Nimzo is doing a X plies search, then the program probes the TBs
>>>in the tree for all nodes that have a distance from the root below or equal to
>>>X-6 (or X-8).
>>>
>>>I don't think that probing the TBs in the first 6/8 plies of the search makes
>>>any sense.
>>
>>Do yo mean this in absolute terms or do you mean this in
>>terms of "doing probes last few plies like qsearch is more important
>>as doing probes in the first 8 plies?"
>>
>>In the first case i would disagree. in the second case i would agree.
>
>
>What I wanted to say is that probing the TBs in the first 6/8 plies ONLY does
>not make sense.
>
>I mean that there must be some mechanism to somehow relate the depth of the
>probing to the depth of the search.
>
>If you are going to depth 25 at this time, you certainly don't want to stop
>probing the TBs at depth 8.
>
>However Alex answered something that is still unclear to me which would suggest
>that in the first 8 plies he does some kind of probe, and he does another kind
>of probe in the next plies. But I can be wrong here.
>
>
>    Christophe


That is what they do.  They load the win/lose/draw tables into memory, but
they don't have them _all_ in that format.  They probe the normal tables
early in the search where the cost is low.  They probe the w/l/d tables
everywhere else as there is no I/O required.  This means that for the w/l/d
tables, you only get a bound on the value and you could get into a never-ending
mate in N loop.  But by probing the real tables early in the tree, they will get
the right distance-to-mate scores where it really matters...

This has been discussed before.  The only problem I pointed out is that if you
do all the 3-4-5 piece tables as win/lose/draw, you _still_ need over a gigabyte
of memory to hold the result.  That is still too big, and now that we are 40
gigabytes into the 6 piece files, forget win/lose/draw for them.



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