Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Programmers: ETC

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:33:12 02/14/03

Go up one level in this thread


On February 14, 2003 at 00:51:54, Antonio Dieguez wrote:

>
>>All that is critical is that you store the same depth you probe with. If you
>>do some extensions before storing, you had better do those same extensions
>>before probing.  IE if you don't, you are going to introduce some huge artifacts
>>that will break things.
>
>It seems that is not all what is critical because precisely you may don't know
>if the same extensions will happen in both ocassions.


That is dangerous.  The hash table stores a "position" and a "value".  If
the "position" is different, then the value is useless.  If you apply different
extensions in the _same_ position, then how can you possibly use a hash table
hit, since you won't know which "case" it should really be matching.

The usual (and correct) way of hashing is to probe in the search, _before_
you do any extensions or anything at this specific ply.  And when you store,
you store the _same_ depth you had when you entered search and did the probe
that failed, so that the next time you probe, and get a match, it makes sense
to use it.

Any other approach is going to produce instabilities.


> Probing and storing with
>the _new_ depth remaining solves that at once, but some others have said is a
>little bit slower for them because they want to probe the hashtable first to
>hopefully avoid the looking-for-extensions fase. Anyway many things have their
>good and bad sides.

The only requirement is that for a position P, with draft D (plies remaining
before you drop into q-search), that D _must_ be the same when you store, as
it will be when you probe for a match for P later.  Any other approach is going
to produce wrong results.



>
>>Either you will be cutting off when you should not, or not cutting off when
>>you should.  The former will cause the search to become very unstable.  The
>>latter will make it slow.
>



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.