Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: hash table size - is a power of 2 still an advantage these days?

Author: Gerd Isenberg

Date: 06:49:49 09/26/03

Go up one level in this thread


On September 26, 2003 at 07:01:49, Ricardo Gibert wrote:

>On September 25, 2003 at 13:02:22, Tord Romstad wrote:
>
>>On September 25, 2003 at 11:28:55, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On September 25, 2003 at 09:48:33, Tord Romstad wrote:
>>>
>>>>On September 24, 2003 at 16:28:57, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>I try to use _most_ of main memory for serious games, and if you have a
>>>>>1 gig machine, I generally use something like hash=784M, hashp=40M,
>>>>>cache=128M, and go from there...
>>>>
>>>>Interesting.  Is a 40M pawn hash table really useful for Crafty?  How big
>>>>are your pawn hash entries?  My pawn hash table contains just 256 entries,
>>>>where each entry is 128 bytes.  The last time I tried, increasing the size
>>>>of the table gave just a very small speedup (less than 2%, if I recall
>>>>correctly).
>>>>
>>>>Tord
>>>
>>>
>>>I've never carefully tested this, but 256 entries seems _way_ small.  Just
>>>look at how many different possible pawn positions there are.
>>
>>I decided to experiment with this again.  I let my engine analyze the
>>position after 1. d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 Be7 to a depth of
>>10 plies with different pawn hash table sizes.  Here are the results
>>(the first column is the number of entries, the second column is the
>>number of seconds needed to complete 10 plies):
>>
>>     1  70.59s
>>     2  60.08s
>>     4  58.28s
>>     8  57.25s
>>    16  55.74s
>>    32  55.24s
>>    64  54.38s
>>   128  54.18s
>>   256  53.76s
>>   512  53.53s
>>  1024  53.32s
>>  2048  53.05s
>>  8192  52.68s
>> 16384  52.25s
>> 32768  52.09s
>> 65536  51.87s
>>131072  51.82s
>>262144  51.85s
>>524288  51.88s
>>
>>As you can see, the speed gain by increasing the number of entries from
>>256 is not very big, and increasing the size beyond 65536 entries seems
>>completely useless.
>>
>>Of course, it is possible that a different position would have given
>>different results.
>>
>>Tord
>
>This is a surprise!

Not for me, even with a one entry Pawn hash you got a lot of hits,
as Tony already mentioned. Try fine70 with one entry ;-)
The advantage of one entry is that you don't bother about index calculation.
But seriously, i found 32K-64K entries an appropriate pawn hash table size.

>If your results are replicated by other programs, it would
>be *very* interesting. Have you any insights on why a bigger phash is not really
>useful?

I guess some diminishing returns, due to irreversibility of pawn moves.
May be more Cache or even TLB misses?

Gerd




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.