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Subject: Re: hash collisions

Author: Frank Schneider

Date: 21:04:19 07/09/02

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On July 09, 2002 at 17:59:17, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>I have been running some tests after prompting by Bruce, and the results
>have been interesting.
>
>The question posed by him was "how many hash collisions (signatures match
>but positions do not) can we tolerate in a search without having serious
>problems?"
>
>I did the following:  I made my HashProbe() routine use the node counter,
>and every N nodes, I would "match" a hash entry even if the signatures were
>not the same, simulating a collision.  I got all the way down to a collision
>every 1000 nodes without seeing even a score change at the root, which was
>surprising.
>
>I would like to ask others to try this as well.  It only adds a couple of
>lines to your HashProbe() code.  I started at one "collision" every 100K
>nodes, but that did nothing.  Then one every 10K.  And finally one every
>1K.  This seems surprising to me.  I ran several positions, with and without
>the "collision problem" and compared my logfile output.  Scores did not change
>at all.  I used tactical positions like Kopec22, opening positions, and even
>the classic fine #70.
>
>Seems that the search is far more resistant to such errors than anybody has
>thought previously.  It would be interesting to see if this is just a result
>of Crafty, or if it holds for others.  Particularly for someone that hashes
>in the q-search, which I do not do...  Note that I did not false match every
>N calls to HashProbe() rather I false matched on the next call to HashProbe()
>after having searched N nodes since the previous call.  Sometimes this would
>be less frequently than once per 1000 nodes obviously, since I could burn
>several thousand nodes in the q-search and not do another false match until I
>get back out of that mess and back into the normal non-qsearch part.

As far as i know older versions of Fritz (< Fritz 5) used a 32-bit hashkey,
so it's likely they had collisions now and then.

Frank



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