Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: speed question

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 12:50:11 02/19/03

Go up one level in this thread


On February 19, 2003 at 15:38:53, Omid David Tabibi wrote:

>On February 19, 2003 at 14:13:47, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On February 19, 2003 at 13:57:41, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>When you want to make your code faster, the most important thing is to find out
>>>where it is slow.  I don't know how familiar you are with profiling, but a good
>>>profiler will show you a lot about your algorithms.  On most programs, and
>>>certaintly for chess programs, most of the time will be dominated by a few hot
>>>spots.  If you spend the effort on the hot spots, it will be enormously more
>>>beneficial than in other places.
>>>
>>>Nuts and bolts tweaky sorts of things are fun to learn.  But an adjustment to
>>>the fundamental algorithm (if it is possible) is often dominatingly better than
>>>that.
>>>
>>>So, my steps to make something faster are like this:
>>>1.  Profile to find the slow spots.
>>>2.  Examine and understand the algorithms in the slow places
>>>3.  Look for a better algorithm
>>>4.  If a better algorithm exists, try it
>>>5.  If a better algorithm does not exist, try to improve the existing algorithm
>>>6.  If still a slow spot, resort to tweaky sorts of things and inline assembly.
>>>
>>>One idea that is often helpful is to precompute as much as possible, and store
>>>the results in a compact lookup table.  Then the complex calculation becomes a
>>>simple lookup.
>>
>>I know it.
>>
>>The point is that the better algorithm that I have is to write similiar
>>functions to the functions that I have and when I write similiar functions I
>>also think of optimizing the previous functions.
>>
>>Today I have not a function to generate only captures and I need to do it but it
>>leads me to think again about my move generator and I find ideas that can do it
>>faster.
>>
>>I do not do the things that will help most to the speed of my program
>>because they may take time and I prefer first to see what I can improve
>>relatively fast.
>>
>>I also think that evaluation of endgames is more important but I like more doing
>>Movei faster because it is easier to test for bugs(if I get the same number of
>>nodes then I know that I probably have no bugs).
>
>But generating random numbers for hash key initializations might cause different
>hash-table overwrites, and thus the total node count might slightly vary on the
>same position and depth.

I use fixed numbers for hash key initializations.

Uri



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.