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Subject: Re: Parallel algorithms in chess programming

Author: Bas Hamstra

Date: 18:13:20 04/16/01

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On April 16, 2001 at 18:45:09, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On April 16, 2001 at 18:15:52, Dieter Buerssner wrote:
>
>>In a different discussion, Vincent wrote the following:
>>
>>>It is not difficult to implement the form of parallellism as used by
>>>Rudolf. Invented by a frenchman who couldn't spell a word english and
>>>who wrote an impossible article for JICCA (did anyone proofread it at
>>>the time as i'm pretty sure they didn't get his parallel idea?).
>>>
>>>At the time when i read the article i was pathetically laughing about it
>>>actually as i also didn't get the idea of the frenchman. But it appears
>>>everyone who can make a chessprogram work under win2000 can also get
>>>within an afternoon his program parallel to work. Then some debugging
>>>and a day later it works cool.
>>
>>I'd be very interested in this algorithm, that can be implemented at an
>>afternoon :-)
>>
>>Could you point elaborate on this.
>
>Answer is: YES...
>
>Ok i'll give a small practical description here. For source code
>to implement some features or in depth questions email me.
>
>There are several forms of parallellism and from the
>shared memory parallellisms a very important difference is:
>  a) dividing the search over the different processors
>  b) completely independant searches which get speeded up by
>     a side effect
>
>Nearly all papers are about a. Of course it took a frenchman
>to find a cheapo algorithm for b.
>
>God knows who proofread that article of the frenchman, probably
>the proofreader was only Jaap v/d Herik and he probably only corrected
>spelling of english as most likely the frenchman couldn't spell english
>at all.
>
>Anyway, Rudolf Huber managed to read it luckily.
>
>The idea is pretty straightforward. Just start your program which we
>will call P1 from process 1.
>
>It is completely the same as normal. No hard changes.
>
>Secondly we start a second program P2. This is nearly the exact same
>program as P2 except it can't do i/o. This program is only analysing
>for example.
>
>To not let P2 always analyze the root position we give moves made
>by P1 to P2. Understand me well we talk about moves made in the GAME,
>not in the search.
>
>So that's pretty little communication from P1 to P2. Probably smart
>is also to give it expected moves by P1 and newgame commands.
>
>But that's about all you need to give from P1 to P2.
>
>Now where is the speedup?
>
>Well in the description as above so far there is no speedup at all.
>The speedup comes from a small side effect. Both P1 and P2 share the
>hashtable!
>
>So sometimes P1 will be speeded up by transpositiontable cutoffs which
>P2 has neatly stored for it in the hashtable.
>
>Even the most deterministic program in the world will be speeded up
>bigtime by this, as after a few microseconds already both processes
>will not search and evaluate the same positions at the exact same time.
>
>Expected speedup of this algorithm should be around 1.6
>
>What do you need to modify to your engine to get it to work?
>
>Steps:
>  a) let p1 start P2 (initially you might want to use
>     _spawnl(), later when it works ok CreateProcess() )
>     Let P2 follow all things P1 is doing and also
>     not let P2 ask for keyboard input.
>     Even not shipping predicted moves is more than ok. just
>     filling hashtable is all what P2 needs to do.
>  b) create a shared hashtable and lock it before you fill it
>
>to talk more about locking hashtable and shipping moves
>to the other process: just like sharing
>hashtable you can share another piece of memory to do all this.
>
>Very important thing for shared memory is to know how volatile
>variables work.
>
>if i have a global variable that is called:
>  int a;
>
>And process P1 says:
>  a = 1;
>
>And process P2 says some later:
>  a = 2;
>
>then it might be that both processes have for quite some time a
>different value in both processors when it is referenced.
>
>If i do however
>  volatile int a;
>
>then the compiler always LOADS the variable from memory.
>
>So a variable which is indicating whether a piece of code is locked
>HAS TO BE volatile.
>
>  volatile int lock;
>
>To lock a variable browse crafty a bit and probably somewhere
>like chess.h or some similar file you'll find definition for
>msvc for lock() and unlock.
>
>Note that sometimes system commands for locking go to the same assembly
>as in chess.h.
>
>There are some pitfalls which you might run in, if you can't figure something
>out then don's HESITATE to ask others who already experienced parallel
>problems, otherwise solutions might take months!
>
>When it works, tips to improve speedup have to do with hashtable:
>  a) use several probes in the hashtable! I'm using 8 probes,
>     perhaps too much for you, but if it is 1 or 2 now, try 4 probes
>     with this algorithm!
>  b) there is no need to lock the hashtable if you use a small trick
>     as used by crafty. Note this trick requires that half of the entry
>     is filled with hashkey, so it probably will eat more bytes an entry
>     which for me is a major obstacle.
>  c) search for smart overwrite approaches of entries. there are zillions
>     of ways to
>     do it. But don't use just 1 bit, that works awful for this algorithm
>     during a game. 1 bit to overwrite is really very little. Use a bit or
>     10 and simply store gamedepth+searchdepth or so and replace on that.
>
>>BTW. In Paderborn, Roland Pfister also told me, that he knows this from Rudolf
>>Huber, and he even started to explain it to me. Somhow, we (or me) got
>>distracted, and I cannot remember the essential things.
>>
>>What I remember is, that the time consuming work, of making your
>>search/evaluation routines free from all those global variables is not needed.
>>
>>Regards,
>>Dieter

- Do you really get 1.6? Because Roland Pfister told me he got 1.2 with this.
- Maybe ETC will help also here? At lower depths trying to play all moves to get
a cutoff?

Bas.






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