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Subject: Re: Detecting Draws using a Small Hash Table?

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 03:19:47 02/21/02

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On February 21, 2002 at 04:59:12, Sune Fischer wrote:

>On February 21, 2002 at 00:18:09, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On February 20, 2002 at 19:18:51, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>>no no i do not mean hashtable. i mean ARRAY with hashcodes
>>>
>>>all you have to do is:
>>>
>>>  for f=current move to 1   f = f -2;
>>>    if( hashcode[f] == currenthash )
>>>      return(drawscore);
>>
>>The question is if there is no small risk of wrong repetition detection.
>>In my program wrong repetition detection can happen only because of bugs and in
>>this case I guess that hashcode[f] is some compression of the position to 32
>>or 64 bit number and it may be the same for different positions.
>>
>>I guess that in the case of 64 bit number the risk is practically 0.
>>
>>Uri
>
>There is no risk to the above method, it works perfectly if you use 64 bit.
>
>I talked to Bruce Moreland about this, it seems *safer* and easier than what he
>proposes at http://www.seanet.com/~brucemo/topics/repetition.htm
>
>He replyed, that he was worried that it would be too slow to do a O(N) search at
>every node. The hashing method requires only a few lookups.
>However, rep. detec. is not needed in qsearch and most of the time the search
>will break quickly because last or previous move was not a "reversible" move
>(you should add a break statement to that code Vincent:).
>
>Bruce did suggest there could be a problem in the endgame if you get close to
>the 50 move rule, then you will be doing a O(50) linear search at every node!!
>
>-S.

O(50) is not so big and it is not going to happen in every node in the
search(even in that case I believe that the difference in speed is not more than
10%).

A lot of these positions are dead draw and you do not need to worry about
them.

Uri



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