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Subject: Re: hash entry replacement schemes-fail soft implications and IID

Author: scott farrell

Date: 01:57:19 09/17/02

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On September 16, 2002 at 09:15:16, Simon Finn wrote:

>On September 14, 2002 at 23:41:55, scott farrell wrote:
>
>>Does anyone know what implications fail-soft might have on hashing?
>>
>>If you do a search say from 1 to 2, and under fail soft it returns 2.5
>>(fail-high / beta cutoff). I am currently storing the score as a beta cuttoff of
>>2.5. If I see this position again, and the depth is good enough, I return the
>>value from the hash table, so this is fail-soft as well.
>>
>>if (mainTable.flag[te] == flagBeta)
>>                    if (mainTable.value[te] >= beta)
>>                                    return mainTable.value[te];
>>
>>I was tracking IID failures, and came up with some debugging that shows
>>occaisonally no entry in the hashtable after a score of >= beta.
>
>Is this surprising?
>
>If you arrive at the same position by different routes,
>you may have different alpha-beta windows.
>
>This means that a fail-soft value (generated with a narrow
>window) is not necessarily reusable (for a search with a
>wider window).
>
>When you search a node at greater depth, you may also have
>a different alpha-beta window (because preceding nodes,
>also searched at greater depth, now return different values).
>
>When you start IID from a node, you may encounter a
>high-draft/small-window/fail-soft node (generated by IID
>from some other node) in the hash table. Depending on
>the actual fail-soft value, this may or may not lie
>outside the current alpha-beta window.
>
>If the stored fail-soft value is within the current
>(wider) window, you will get a "hash table failure".
>
>Does this explain what you are seeing, or have I misunderstood
>the problem?

Simon,

thanx for that.

It sounds like you know your stuff, I'll re-read it a few times, and it sounds
like it might answer it.

thanks again
Scott

>
>Simon
>
>
>>I am still
>>trying to trace it down. It seems lots more of these occured nearer to the
>>terminal nodes (search horizon). I stopped IID recursing nearer the terminal
>>nodes, and many of the failures stopped. I guess I might not be hashing enough
>>details near the terminal nodes. I have tried turning on and off storing values
>>from the qsearch, but it didnt seem to effect things.



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