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Subject: Re: Pawn Hash Collisions in Crafty

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 11:13:32 12/05/01

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On December 05, 2001 at 09:44:44, Sune Fischer wrote:

>On December 05, 2001 at 09:17:39, David Rasmussen wrote:
>
>>That's all true. But I'm not asking "why doesn't this work". I am assuming that
>>people think that 32-bits is ok for chess, and I'm indeed asking "are you sure
>>that there isn't a problem with this, such as hitting too many different
>>positions for this to be a good idea, because I am seeing collisions".
>
>And I am saying, that _if_ you get collisions then that is most likely a
>problem, but I don't understand why you are getting collisions at all in the
>first place.
>
>>Sure, but that would be a little harder to implement than the experiment I'm
>>doing now. The important thing is that we want to be able to actually tell
>>different positions apart. I have now rerun the experiment but with the change
>>that I also check some of the data that is stored in the table, that is _not_
>>dependant on anything (such as asymmetry og game phase) other than the pawn
>>structure itself (such as the 8-bit bitboards of which files contain white
>>pawns, likewise for black pawns, the 8-bit bitboards of files with passed
>>pawns). And the collision rate is the same. This test is even stronger, as it
>>positively says that the position that was hashed here was definately not the
>>same position as this one, because they have pawns on different files. The rate
>>seems to be exactly the same, and as I felt pretty sure that I had accounted for
>>asymmetries and gamephases in the first place, this new experiment only confirms
>>that.
>
>We need Bob or some other third party to make tests too I think.

I have already done this.  In fact, anyone that _doesn't_ do this is inviting
great grief.  It is essential that the hashed information match _exactly_ the
computed information for every position.  And I do this as part of my debugging
from time to time, which will often catch a bug where I forget to stick
something in the pawn hash record, but I use it later anyway.





>
>>If there _are_ collisions, those 10000 positions (if that is even a reasonable
>>number, I assume it is), are getting overwritten pretty often.
>
>>So why don't you
>>believe that this is what is happening?
>
>Why would they get overridden?
>Most of them will fit in a small table, and since there are no more positions
>there is nothing else to collide with.
>
>>/David



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