Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: History heuristic and high search depths

Author: Gerd Isenberg

Date: 13:01:43 12/09/03

Go up one level in this thread


On December 09, 2003 at 06:54:24, Ulrich Tuerke wrote:

>On December 08, 2003 at 16:19:48, Tim Foden wrote:
>
>>On December 08, 2003 at 11:02:22, Alvaro Jose Povoa Cardoso wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>I've been thinking about the efficiency of the history heuristic at high search
>>>depths.
>>>It seems to me that the history table will be overwritten many times if we have
>>>a search of several billions of nodes. Additionally, as the search moves to
>>>different parts of the tree the history table values will be somewhat trashed.
>>>What do you think we could do about this?
>>>Maybe limit the history heuristic to a certain depth (ex: the nominal depth).
>>>
>>>Comments anyone?
>>
>>What happens in GLC is whenever it increments a value in the history table it
>>checks it against a maximum.  If the maximum value is exceeded, it divides all
>>values in the table by 2.
>
>Isn't this a bit expensive ? I guess that this may happen several times per
>iteration, and perhaps very often at higher iterations.
>
>I do it like this
>
>		if (*hisptr < maximum)
>		    *hisptr += ((depth*32) >> iteration_no);
>
>"depth is the distance of the current ply to horizon, so this measures in some
>way the size of the sub-tree which had been cut.
>
>i.e. the increment is smaller at higher iterations, because at higher iterations
>I expect the history to be filled much faster.
>At start of a new iteration, I divide all entries by 2.
>
>However, I'm not sure how well this works.
>
>Uli
>>
>>Cheers, Tim.

Hi Tim and Uli,

i do it in a similar way than Uli but increment some common overflow counter for
each color in an else case. If the number of overflows per side exceeds some
threshold i divide all history counters (unsigned chars) of this side by two (or
four) and clear the overflow counter. Trade off of saturation versus too many
divides and a few more tuning screws ;-)

Cheers,
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.