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Subject: Hashing "draft"

Author: Scott Gasch

Date: 11:25:19 12/06/00


Hi all,

My hashing code is working very well since I've been looking at it carefully and
finding bugs.  Thanks for your help and comments.

I am still unclear on one issue, though.  Many people have said "store the
remaining depth in the draft of a hash entry."  What happens if I make a move,
say "aha, this was a threatoning pawn push, extend by 1 ply!" then call search
recursively.  This returns a fail high (beta cutoff).

Now I am about to store a lower bound in my hash... this position is worth at
least X, maybe more.  Do I store this with a draft of depth or depth + extend?
I think depth + extend -- after all I got the score from a depth + extend call
to search... the remaining depth for this position was depth + extend?  Some
people have said "make sure you don't store extend values in your hash table or
you will have bugs" and I don't understand this.

If I was about to store an exact or upper bound in the hash table after
searching all N moves in this position I would store with a draft of depth
_unless_ every move was searched with an extend of 1 ply.  This is the case in
my code when the side on move is in check... so in this case I would store depth
+ extend again.

Maybe I'm loony or don't fully understand this stuff.  But the way I see it is
that I have a score X from an expensive recursive call(s) to search... and I
want to save this score for later.  If I every one of my 1..N calls to search
used to generate X was made with a depth of depth + extend I store this as the
draft.

Later if someone comes in and says I need a score of the same position to depth
+ 1 it should be OK to give them the same score computed above... because of the
extend above I did end up computing score X to depth + 1 already...

Do I misunderstand some negative aspect of this plan?

As always, much appreciate the help.
Scott



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