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Subject: Re: TB cache size recommendations, please!

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 17:26:12 04/10/00

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On April 10, 2000 at 18:45:23, Eelco de Groot wrote:

>On April 10, 2000 at 14:45:13, John Coffey wrote:
>
>>Let me get this sraight....
>>
>>1.  hash is the transposition table.
>>2.  hashp is pawn structure caching?
>>3.  cache is used for tablebase caching?
>>
>>How does one cache tablebase stuff?  It is all endgames so I am not sure I see
>>the benefit.   I guess that the exact same endgame could arrise in multiple
>>continuations.
>>
>>John Coffey
>
>I don't know much about how these hash tables are built up, -I do think you are
>right about hash, hashp and cache-, but if the number of pieces on the board
>goes down the number of transpositions that you will see in a typical position
>and chess-tree goes up by a lot. That's why hashtables (transposition tables)
>are especially effective in endgames. So that would also be true with only 3 to
>5 pieces on the board then. If you can search the transposition tables faster
>than the endgame tables on CD or on harddisk, compressed or not, such tablebase
>caching would pay off. I don't know if for Robert Hyatt's Crafty on the Quad the
>tablebases are also accessed while they are still compressed? In that case
>transposition tables would I think be faster still. But once a program is
>actually in a 3 to 5 piece sitation, would it then not be possible to use all
>room in the normal hash for just the endgame tablebase caching? And, if in
>Shredder's case the endgame tables are still on (Turbo-)CD I don't understand
>why Shredder wouldn't profit from more than 4 Mb? As I said I don't know that
>much about the subject. If maybe somebody could edify a little? (Like Dan's
>Encyclopedia Brittannica I mean?)
>
>Thanks
>Eelco


As counter-intuitive as it sounds, compressed on-the-fly accesses are faster
for almost all machines.  A compressed block has to be decompressed, for
certain.  But you read in more useful data in a compressed block than in an
uncompressed one (several times as much data).  Which means that when using
compressed data, the effective I/O thruput goes up by a factor of 5 or more,
which more than offsets the time to decompress...

I am using compressed databases (with raid0 in linux) to _really_ make I/O
fly...



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