Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: About random numbers and hashing

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 13:31:15 12/05/01

Go up one level in this thread


On December 05, 2001 at 15:46:12, David Rasmussen wrote:
[...]
>>sequence with a good Hamming distance in the cited text above. Such a sequence
>>of numbers are not (pseudo) random numbers anymore, because it would not show
>>the expected statistics for this properity!
>>
>
>Randomness is not important.

I didn't want to imply anything different. I just mentioned it, because people
seem to call this still a sequence of reandom numbers.

>[...] I talked to my algebraic coding theory
>professor about this, [...]

Perhaps you can have another talk with him :-)

Generating hash keys reminds me very much of lagged fibonacci RNGs, where you
get a new random number, by doing some operation on previously generated
numbers. Often something like r = state[n-k] op state[n-l]. For this class of
RNGs, it is well known, that using xor as op yields much worse results, than
using for example subtraction (this is the RNG used in Crafty), or addition.
Overflow and underflows would wrap around, just like the typical unsigned
artithmetics.

So, would it be preferable for hashkeys to use addition as well (and subtraction
to clear a piece from the board). It should use almost the same time as the xor
method?

Regards,
Dieter




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.