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Subject: Re: Hashtables: is larger always better?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 10:05:43 09/26/01

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On September 26, 2001 at 05:34:56, Sune Fischer wrote:

>On September 25, 2001 at 20:11:57, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>>>That is correct.  But the way zobrist works, it is far more likely that
>>>>that position is a _real_ match rather than a false match...  So that once
>>>>you fill the table, you can't assume that _every_ probe from that point
>>>>forward is a false match.  very few will be in fact...
>>>
>>>Well no, see my other post:
>>>http://www.icdchess.com/forums/1/message.shtml?190349
>>>You forget that the problem here is, that you would not
>>>be able to update any entries, and so as the game evolves, new positions will
>>>occur and old ones will never be re-seached. This will lead to collisions.
>>
>>You overlook that positions get overwritten _all_ the time in the search.  This
>>is a two-way street.  They get overwritten.  They get reused.  They will, on
>>occasion, get incorrectly reused (collisions).  But once it is full, the table
>>is not just "full".  It will still get overwritten furiously because of all the
>>shallow leaf searches that demand to store information in the table...
>
>Yes so true, but if your table is twice as big, then you have twice as many
>entries to overwrite, the likelihood of you missing one that eventually ends up
>as a collision is therefor greater.
>And as you increase the size of the table, the average "age" of each hash
>element will also increase and thus diminishing the chance of a good clean hit.
>
>>IE I don't believe that doubling the hash size will double that collision
>>rate.  But that I can test when I have some time.  It will be interesting to
>>try.  I might get time on a machine with 16 gigs of RAM so I can try doubling
>>several times to see what happens.
>
>Good idea, but you might want to use smaller keys, or you will have to let it
>run forever to get a good statistic.
>
>Thank you for the clear answer BTW, we disagree then, no harm in that :)


I really don't want to test with smaller keys.  When I tried 32 bits in the
tests Stanback, I and others did, it was horrible.  Collisions per second.  I
didn't think the search could stand that.  However, I have never tried to
determine how many collisions (replace this with bogus scores) the search can
tolerate with no ill side-effects.  That would be a _very_ good paper.  Which I
suppose I will write if nobody else does...



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