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Subject: Re: Playing strength between TheKing 3.12, 3.12c and 3.12d?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 18:08:08 10/04/01

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On October 04, 2001 at 14:40:47, John Merlino wrote:

>On October 04, 2001 at 13:55:40, Kurt Utzinger wrote:
>
>>Is there any differnce in playing strength between these three version of
>>TheKing. My experience show no difference betwenn 3.12 and 3.13c but so far I
>>have not tested 3.12d.
>>Regards
>>Kurt
>
>There is no difference in playing strength/style/quality between the 3.12 and
>3.12c versions (and the versions in between them, obviously). However, 3.12d
>does improve blitz/bullet play under certain circumstances, specifically when
>using a very large hash table.
>
>The King clears its hash table on every move. In my testing with 3.12c on a
>PIII-600, it took about 1/3 to 1/2 second to clear a 32MB hash table. This is
>not significant during standard play, but losing 1/2 second per move in bullet
>is costly. The King 3.12d drastically improved the method in which the hash
>table is cleared, so this no longer becomes a problem. However, once again, this
>was only a problem if a large hash table was being used in a fast game.

I find that really, really puzzling.  When analyzing EPD records (for instance)
it makes great sense to clear the hash table between moves.

When playing a game, you are throwing away a huge amount of computational
information.  Let's suppose that they pick the move I was pondering...  In that
case, I should already have computed the answer to quite a large depth.  Why
solve them over from scratch?  Stale entries should get over-written anyway.

To throw away the hash table between moves by clearing it is bizarre.  Why would
anyone do that?



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