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Subject: Re: deep blue versus diep

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 07:07:27 04/13/03

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On April 13, 2003 at 10:01:48, Omid David Tabibi wrote:

>On April 13, 2003 at 07:41:00, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On April 13, 2003 at 00:14:52, Omid David Tabibi wrote:
>>
>>may i remind you that many programs use R=3 basically with exception sometimes
>>of the nullmove of depthleft == 4.
>>
>>I'm doing more in qsearch than you do.
>>
>>Further your verification search is using R=3 too with a bug in the hashtables
>>management. Because of that bug which is that you do not store in hashtables
>>whether a search result is based upon a verification or not, the worst case
>>performance of verification search is R=3.
>
>One of the reviewers of the article asked several questions regarding the use of
>hash tables in conjunction with verified null-move pruning. I told him exactly
>what I told you, i.e., the depth stored in the hash table is the depth after
>reduction (e.g., if we were in depth 6, have a fail-high report and reduce the
>depth to 5, then the final stored depth in the hash table is 5). That might be
>too conservative a method, but it guarantees that no hash table bugs (of the
>form you mention) are encountered.

That is not fixing it at all of course. You need to write to hashtable for
*every* position that gets stored whether you did or did not do a verification.

Then based upon this bit and whether you already did in the current search a
verification, you can decide whether you can give a cutoff or not.

So your method does not fix the problem at all. It fixes it for a *few*
positions only.

>However, I did not explicitly mention it in the article, as I preferred that it
>remain as an exercise to the reader (and the reviewer also agreed that it might
>be best to leave it to the reader to experiment). The method I used might be too
>conservative, and so other programmers might achieve even better results by
>using a more aggressive use of hash tables.



>
>>
>>Best regards,
>>Vincent
>>
>>>On April 12, 2003 at 22:45:19, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>
>>>>On April 12, 2003 at 13:20:51, Omid David Tabibi wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On April 12, 2003 at 10:02:43, Uri Blass wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On April 12, 2003 at 09:17:31, Omid David Tabibi wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Quite an interesting read Vincent.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>I'm afraid you are investing too much in the parallel speedup though. Any
>>>>>>>hardware speedup will be linear (at best) while algorithmic enhancements are
>>>>>>>exponential. If you manage to search one ply deeper by an algorithmic
>>>>>>>improvement, the gain will be more than any parallel speedup can yield.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I agree that the hardware speedup from parallel search will be linear at best
>>>>>>but linear improvement is not always less than one ply.
>>>>>
>>>>>Diep is already parallel. I assume that he will get far less than a 4x speedup
>>>>>for his latest work on massive parallelism. Assuming an effective branching
>>>>>factor of 4, that speedup will equal one ply.
>>>>
>>>>b.f. = 2.9
>>>
>>>Because you are using standard R=3; but is the search reliable? That bf will not
>>>be of much use if it causes Diep to find the correct move two plies later in
>>>comparison to its competitors. When was the last time you compared Diep's
>>>performance to other engines using test suites?
>>>
>>>BTW, I can get even a smaller branching factor than yours in no time. I will
>>>just use standard R=6 :)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>If the number of processors is big then it can be more than one ply.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I believe that it is possible to get a lot more than one ply by pruning and
>>>>>>extensions but I decided that I prefer first to improve movei's evaluation and
>>>>>>only later to improve movei by better pruning and extensions because evaluation
>>>>>>is one of the things that is used in decisions about pruning and extensions.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I believe that Movei's main problem in games with programs at similiar strength
>>>>>>is in the endgame so I will probably do some improvement in that stage before
>>>>>>going back to search.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Uri



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