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Subject: Can looking forward in hash table increase the number of visited nodes ?

Author: Andrea Griffini

Date: 13:34:09 06/16/03


I'm writing a chess program (iigchess on FICS) and I implemented
something I've seen described and to which I didn't think myself
before, that is doing a scan on all moves when entering a node
in the alpha-beta search to see if any of the reachable positions
is already in the hash table and its value can justify a beta cut.
Doing this after the hash table probe for this node but before
doing the move sorting and before starting evaluating the moves
seemed to me a possibility to save something, but after implementing
it I saw that I was actually getting an *increased* number of
visited nodes to reach the same search depth.

Does this means there's a bug in my code or that can indeed happen ?

My hash table is just a single-probe always-update one, but I
suppose that shouldn't be the problem. Also a position in the hash
table is considered usable only if the search depth that generated
the stored result is not lower than current search depth or if we
are in capture search (search depth is expressed in units of one
tenth of a ply, depth<0 means capture search).

Andrea



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