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Subject: Re: "unintended features" very funny ;-) NT

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 14:37:12 08/19/03

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On August 19, 2003 at 17:14:35, Russell Reagan wrote:

>On August 19, 2003 at 17:04:44, Dieter Buerssner wrote:
>
>>First I thought: don't clear the bits. With every new search, toggle the
>>"current_age_bit". Add little logic to Probe/Store functions (it should not
>>decrease efficiency much, because we need a slow memory look-up anyway), that
>>just assumes the entry is empty, when the bit does not fit.
>>
>>But at second thought, this would not really help. Because the new search might
>>not touch one entry, and the second new search would assume, that the entry is
>>current. So, there is again an influence of the history of the game due to TTs,
>>something that Johan wanted to avoid from the start.
>>
>>Another approach would be, to have the age bits in one seperate small table.
>>Assuming you have 64 Mb hash, with 16 bytes each entry, this would be 4 million
>>bits, or 1/2 Mb of RAM. Something that probably would stay in second level cache
>>most of the time on a modern computer. Clearing would use practically no time,
>>but accessing the second table would mean some overhead.
>
>You could make your initial idea work, by using a byte instead of a bit. Johan
>said in another post that his hash entry was 30 bytes in size. Adding an extra
>byte wouldn't increase memory too much (31 MB instead of 30 MB for instance),
>and you would have to play 128 moves (256 ply) for the same "current age byte"
>to appear again, and by that time there will surely be no old positions left
>from 256 ply into the past.

I don't think Johan is eager to squander bits like that ;)

If there are no bits left over then it's probably not an option. I guess there
could also be some aligning issues, using 1 extra byte can require 3 extra.

Dieters suggestion sounds good though if you want super fast clearing, but I
doubt it's even worth considering unless you (like me) care a lot for playing
bullet games.

-S.



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