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Subject: Re: 0x88 compared to rot BB

Author: Bas Hamstra

Date: 01:22:06 01/13/03

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On January 12, 2003 at 21:01:01, Russell Reagan wrote:
>On January 12, 2003 at 20:25:01, Bas Hamstra wrote:

>>I test it with all pieces being still on the board, while the square in
>>question is not attacked. So a worst case scenario.
>
>In that case, the bitboards should perform about equally fast in any position
>whether there is an attack or not. The 0x88 isn't the same though. It will be
>slower if there is no attack, and faster if there is. So if you used more
>positions (not just a few, but a lot, like during a search) you might find it\
>to be faster overall. Gerbil is faster than Crafty, sometimes almost twice as
>fast, and so that speed has to come from somewhere.

Thanks for your data about Gerbil, this motivates me again :-) It is difficult
to predict how fast a program is going to be. I remember the GNU guys tested all
critical functions when they switched to bitboards, and they were faster than
the old versions. But when the rewrite was finished, the nps went *down*
somewhat.

Yes, where does gerbil's high nps come from? I have a few ideas without knowing
Gerbil too well.

- it probably does not do SEE sorting in the qsearch (?), which Crafty does do,
this really kills nps but not overall searchdepth. In Tao I assign SEE scores to
ALL captures which is even worse than Bob does (he does not calculate SEE if
Defender > Attacker or a capture is considered "futile").
- Gerbil has less eval, mostly piece-square stuff
- 0x88 is more cache-friendly

Another thing is that Bruce probably uses a more efficient InCheck detection
than SquareAttacked.

>>No, but my BB program (Tao) does typically around 400k nps where Crafty does
>>600k on my hardware, so slower. The new 0x88 toy doesn't even have a search
>>yet,
>>but I aim for at least 1M nps in the midgame for piece/square plus extensive
>>pawn eval.
>
>Gerbil, on my PC (PIII 733 MHz), gets between 500knps and 800knps in the games
>I have played with it. For comparison, Crafty gets between 300knps and
>500knps. My computer is certainly not the newest fastest thing, so I imagine
>Gerbil could get 1Mnps easily on a faster machine, and so could your 0x88
>program.

Thanks for this interesting data.


Best regards,
Bas.


>> Yes, I thought about that. I don't see a point in looping through 8 pawns to
>> see if one square is attacked, that's why I put the conditionals in, which
>> saves about half of the piece-loop and should be faster overall, I would
>> suspect.
>
>Good point. I didn't consider that.
>
>Russell



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