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Subject: Re: Tom Kerrigan

Author: Bas Hamstra

Date: 06:17:59 06/01/00

Go up one level in this thread


On May 31, 2000 at 19:24:37, Brian Richardson wrote:

>On May 31, 2000 at 18:02:42, Bas Hamstra wrote:
>
>>Tom,
>>
>>I read another thread about Killers and have an opinion on it.
>>
>>- Doing captures separately speeds you up considerably
>>- Doing an on the fly legality check for killers speeds you up noticably
>>- Doing SEE based pruning of losing captures in the qsearch cuts the number of
>>nodes and improves node/qnode ratio. You don't have to SEE sort for it. I doubt
>>SEE sorting is a winner anyway.
>>- Having the former, you can skip losing captures in the normal search as well
>>with it, and do those later. Improves sorting noticably.
>>
>>This goes for all versions and half baken versions I have ever made.
>>
>>Bas.
>
>I did some quick tests with Tinker (of course, the search "ecosystem" of each
>program will be very different).  Normally, Tinker probes the hash table, then
>does the hash move (if any), then killers, then generates moves, and so on.

I hope you DO captures before killers? Doing that, killers should be a big win.
But note that if you already do history, that the extra gain of killers is far
less, because both try to achieve the same.

>For the following, one history table for both sides is always used.  Tested on
>five positions (opening, two from WAC, one from Fine and one BT2630):
>1) Turning hash moves off--usually 2x slower, up to 10x slower, one test 5%
>faster.
>2) Turning killers off (keeping 2 moves)--very mixed results: same, or up to 30%
>faster or up to 10x slower (Fine16)

This 10x slower is counter intuitive to me. If you don't use history sorting
killers should be a big win. If you do, it is a small win overall.

>3) Turning off both--better than no killers, but worse than no hash move.
>
>To my surprise, Tinker's WAC 300 score went UP with no killers.  Again, this is
>with history (disabling history slows everything down A LOT).  I may try some
>self-play tests with and without killers.
>
>Brian Richardson

Maybe you could also include: a) History and no killers and b) Killers and no
history? I suspect that if you already use 2 killers the gain of adding history
is small. And since killers are cheaper I don't use history sorting...


Regards,
Bas.



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