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Subject: Re: What should I include in the Bench command

Author: Richard Pijl

Date: 02:42:06 12/06/02

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>>>My questions are the following:
>>>1)What statistics should I include in the bench commands
>>>to do it more productive.
>>
>>I haven't got much besides nodes either. I print only totals for the positions
>>together as the normal statistics output can be used per position (just type
>>'post' after starting bench).
>>The statistics printed for the total set are: nodes, qnodes, time and knps.
>
>I understand but in this way you cannot find a bug that happen only in games and
>not in analysis.

I was under the impression you wanted to compare two versions of your program
and see whether you've broken something in optimizing it. If you have broken
something in search, eval, move generation it is very likely to show up in
there. But this of course always depends on the positions chosen in the bench
command.

>possible ideas to catch more bugs are also to tell the program to play against
>itself in fixed depth and count nodes to finish the game but I wait to hear from
>more expereinced programmers.

I don't think you will gain much by it as it requires a lot more execution time.
And making search more shallow probably won't do much good.

I've seen problems where node count started to differ only at ply 5 or 6, and
not in all positions either. So a deeper search on positions with the potential
of having for instance weird ep problems might do you better than having many
positions on a shallow search.
To find hashtable reuse/aging problems two moves in a row might be useful
though. I haven't tried that one yet.
>
>>
>>>
>>>I am sure that more statistics is needed and not only the number of nodes at
>>>fixed depth.
>>>
>>>I guess that it may be better if I write a function
>>>nextstring(epdfile) to get the next string.
>>>so I can use one loop instead of a lot of setup commands.
>>
>>I'm using a fixed set of positions so I don't really care about this.
>>Richard
>
>I understand but I want to use a set of hundreds of positions(the GCP test suite
>includes 183 positions and wac include 300 positions) and I do not want to print
>hundreds of lines in the source of bench.

You might consider building your own built-in test function instead, and as a
bonus report the number of nodes used ...

Richard



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