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Subject: Re: question about speed in hash tables

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 09:01:37 10/17/02

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On October 17, 2002 at 06:20:11, Uri Blass wrote:

>Today my repetition detection is not done based on hash tables and I plan to do
>it faster by hash tables.

Why would this be faster, taking x86 cpu architecture into account?


>After every makemove I calculate the new hash key for the hash tables

You don't incrementally calculate the zobrist hashing yet by just
xor-ing the pieces you moved to the hashkey?

>but I do not have an array of all the hash keys and I use a global varaible
>__int64 zob to have the hash key.

i'm using for the x86 architecture  2 x 'unsigned int' for the hashkey.
The reason is that it was faster than a single 'unsigned _int64'.

Compilers not so efficient yet, though intel c++ might be doing this
more efficient than others :)

>I plan to add an array zobkey[max_plies_of_game] for hash keys
>My question is what is faster:

>1)Doing all the calculation on zob and after finishing them to do
>zobkey[hply]=zob;

this is by far fastest of course.

>2)Doing all the calculations on zobkey[hply]

extra array references cause extra instructions such as
indirect accessing the array by [EAX].

Way faster is all operations onto a single register.

>I guess that I am going to choose 1 because it is more simple and I guess that
>the difference in speed is less than 0.1% but I am interested to know what is
>faster.

Well it should take very little system time in total anyway, but
working on 1 global variable is always faster than doing it by using
arrays.

>Doing all the calculations on zobkey[hply] seems to have one less arithmetic
>calculation but more array calls.

Arithmetic is very cheap (exception: BSF and BSR vector instructions)

In general you should assume in the future that processors (take the
mckinley as example) will do more instructions in either a bundle or
within a single clock. Memory will get slower. So instructions that
act upon a single register will be very slow unless it is complex
instructions like BSF. Even multiplying i am using scrupuleous above
adding a single small local array!

a hashtable is way slower because it eats more memory than a single
array [hply]. That O(1) lookup is of course way slower than doing
a lookup in that array with hashnumbers which is already inside
perhaps even your L1 cache already.

Also in order to get a hashtable correctly to work you need a linked
list hashtable. At paper that sounds cool perhaps, but it is hell slow.

>Uri



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