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Subject: Re: Is more hash better? My tests say the opposite...

Author: Michael P. Nance Sr.

Date: 10:20:48 09/01/03

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On August 31, 2003 at 21:18:58, Ross Boyd wrote:

>On August 31, 2003 at 19:44:28, William Penn wrote:
>
>>The more hash I allocate, the slower the kN/s speed. Thus 4MB (the minimum) is
>>the fastest in my tests, typically about 450kN/s. If I increase that to say
>>256MB hash, the speed slows down to about 400kN/s. The more I increase hash, the
>>slower the kN/s speed.
>>
>>The kN/s speed peaks, then eventually starts to decrease. How long this takes
>>depends on the amount of hash. However in my tests, the long term speed
>>advantage of bigger hash never catches up with the long term speed obtained with
>>smaller hash. Thus I don't see any advantage whatsoever to using a hash table!
>>The opposite seems to be true!?
>>
>>I'm using the Shredder7 GUI, Shredder 7.04 UCI engine, AMD XP Athlon 2400+/640MB
>>RAM (608MB available). The GUI says the maximum I can allocate to hash is about
>>455MB, so I'm not near the limit. Of course I'm using fairly common practical
>>positions for these tests in Infinite Analysis mode, and the above indicated
>>results are typical.
>>
>>I get very similar results running Shreddermarks with different size hash. The
>>more hash, the lower the Shreddermark and corresponding kN/s.
>>
>>Now, will someone please refute this, or explain what I'm missing or
>>overlooking? Thanks!
>>WP
>
>Increasing the hash size will tend to lower the NPS in most engines.
>
>Its kind of hard to explain why this is so... but I'll try. When an engine gets
>a hit in the hashtable it often cuts short the amount of exhaustive quiescence
>searching where NPS tends to go high. Nearer the root there is generally more
>overhead involved, with for example, more sophisticated move ordering etc...
>whereas the move ordering at the QS tends to be cruder and hence faster.
>
>Anyway, its not a bad thing....
>
>What is more important is the total number of nodes visited to get to a certain
>depth. You will see that increasing hash size will tend to reduce the tree...
>and therefore (even though NPS drops slightly) the actual time taken to get to a
>given depth is reduced (usually).
>
>Time how long Shredder takes to get to a given depth, and also the total nodes
>visited, with various positions for two hash sizes.  You'll see the true benefit
>of increasing the hash size.
>
>If you turn off the hash altogether you'll see the NPS increase a lot... but its
>not going to play stronger that's for sure...
>
>So, NPS is not a measure of strength. Really, its only useful for comparison
>purposes of the same engine with the same hash size on 2 different PCs.
>
>Hope this makes sense...
>
>Ross

I will tell You this,when I demisish the Hash,(32,64,128,ect),I get beat. When I
go "FULL THROTTLE",or optimise the Hash,(819), I usually beat the same Box and
Program that I couldn't beat with a lower Hash setting.>>>>Mike



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