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Subject: Re: Pawn Hash Collisions in Crafty

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 03:42:52 12/05/01

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On December 05, 2001 at 06:02:45, David Rasmussen wrote:

>>Whether or not 32 bit is sufficient depends on which "resolution" you require.
>>If you need to distinguish between millions of different positions, then 32 bit
>>will create too many collisions, probably somewhere near the numbers you've been
>>talking. But if you "only" have a few thousand different positions (which is
>>typical if you hash pawns _only_) then on average you should have about 1%
>>chance of a collision in an entire game.
>>
>>Try and count how many different positions you get, this is really the key
>>factor.
>>
>
>First of all, we're both talking about hashing pawns only. And that is what I
>have been talking about all along. Now:
>
>I disagree. They key factor is how many actual collisions returning wrong scores
>(and other wrong data from the pawn hash table) you have, regardless of how many
>positions etc.

But I showed you the math, the odds can be calculated and that is what I base my
opinion on.
I think either you have way more than a few thousand positions (why won't you
count them?), or you have overlooked something else.

>I know that there aren't that many pawn positions during the
>cause of a game, but I really don't care. The important thing is to measure how
>often the hashtable adds incorrectness that _would_ not have been there, had it
>not been for the pawn hashtable, i.e. a defect or, if you will, a bug of the
>pawn hashtable.

This process is way more complicated, I suspect you get "collisions" due some
other parts of the code.
If you insist on the empirical data (which is great actaully), then perhaps try
a simpler approach, like someone suggested use 64 bit and see how often the
reduced 32 bit keys will collide.

>And whether this rate is "high" or "low", I don't know. Until I
>am sure it is not "too high", I will stick with a rate of zero. Your argument
>that there is about 1% chance of collision per game is all well and good. It
>just doesn't matter, since Crafty have more than 1 collision a second with appx.
>150 kn/s from the initial position. I am asking several questions:
>
>Is this expected or a bug?
>Is it too high?
>If not, why?
>
>/David

-S.



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