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Subject: Re: A Question Of Speed

Author: Will Singleton

Date: 20:35:05 11/15/00

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On November 15, 2000 at 22:57:05, Michael Neish wrote:

>On November 15, 2000 at 22:30:41, James Swafford wrote:
>
>>There are lots of variables here. :-)
>
>Of course I'm aware of that, but I thought there may be a simple explanation.  I
>converted my program to bitboards some time ago, and it ended up slowing down
>the program by about 30%, although I think it's worth it in the long run.  Of
>course I'm using quiesce(), and counting all nodes in search() and quiesce() --
>separately, just to see the proportion of nodes searched in each.  I use lazy
>eval, but at the moment generate caps and non-caps together.  Separating them is
>next on my list, though I don't think that it will make up for the huge
>difference, do you?  Yes I can fail high before generating moves if the hash
>score says so.  I also use mva/lva and return early from quiesce() if the
>captured piece doesn't bring the score high enough.  I also do a little bit of
>futility pruning, but not really enough to affect speed I think.
>
>In your experience, what sort of gain could I expect from generating captures
>and trying them before generating non-captures?  By the way, I generate moves
>before trying the hash move (though it's placed first on the list).  Surely
>there's a lot of optimisation possible here.  But again, is it enough to make up
>the difference?
>
>Oh, and by optimisation I mean "hand optimised".  I have a lot of diagnostics
>running, and some experimental stuff which I'll optimise if worthwhile.  I'm
>using CodeWarrior Pro 5 with all optimisations on full, of course.
>
>Thanks for your reply.
>
>Mike.
>
>

Mike,

MacChess gets about 400k nps on my comp, and I believe it's because he reports
nodes*=5, or something like that.  No way to know, one way or the other.  Don't
know about Sigmachess, didn't think the nps was high on that one.

Again, I don't think nps has much relevance, counts are arbitrary.  What matters
more is depth.  However, even there you don't know what you're getting.  I guess
it really comes down to this: reported nps and reported depth are irrelevant.
Whether you win or lose is what's important.

Will



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