Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Shredder 8 bug ? (Zied Haddad)

Author: Matthias Gemuh

Date: 10:59:54 02/03/04

Go up one level in this thread


On February 03, 2004 at 12:49:53, William Penn wrote:

>On February 03, 2004 at 11:02:05, Bob Durrett wrote:
>
>>On February 03, 2004 at 08:09:52, William Penn wrote:
>>
>>>On February 03, 2004 at 04:32:35, Matthias Gemuh wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Zied Haddad seems to be unable to connect to CCC from Tunesia.
>>>>He seeks to know whether others have encountered a Shredder 8 problem he has:
>>>>
>>>>after playing many games in a row without clearing hash tables, Shredder 8
>>>>starts messing and missing even mate in 1, till hash tables are cleared.
>>>>
>>>>[http://f50.parsimony.net/forum200321/messages/5855.htm]
>>>>
>>>>/Matthias
>>>>(message posted on Zied's request)
>>>
>>>You may be right. I'm not sure yet, but I will start clearing the hash tables
>>>before each analysis and see if it makes a difference. Note that I only run
>>>Shredder 8 in infinite analysis mode for a long time to analyze positions.
>>
>><snip>
>>>
>>>WP
>>
>>(1)  I read somewhere that it's always a good idea to clear the hashtables
>>before starting a new analysis but do not recall the reason.  Nevertheless, I
>>now always hit that "clear hashtable" button whenever I see it.
>>
>>(2)  The PV for Shredder is total garbage except for the first move and this is
>>a known bug in Shredder, acknowledged by it's author.  It hopefully will be
>>fixed one of these days.  The sooner the better.
>>
>>(3)  With some engines, I notice another bug which may or may not be related to
>>this one.  While doing user-guided infinite analysis, sometimes the nps number
>>drops to a tenth of it's normal value.  When that happens I cuss a little and
>>then save the position, turn off the engine, and then restart it, clearing the
>>hashtable.  Then the nps goes back to a reasonable value.  I do not recall which
>>engine does this, but it has to be either Crafty, Shredder, Fritz, Hiarcs,
>>Tiger, or Junior since those are the engines I use as CB8 analysis engines and
>>for overnight automated game analyses.
>>
>>(4)  I still have not learned how to use Chessmaster for analysis, perhaps
>>because I'm getting overly senile.  It's a pity that The King is not available
>>as a CB8 analysis engine because if it were I would use it often.
>>
>>Bob D.
>
>Thanks for the info. Can you tell me what "PV" means? I see it mentioned all the
>time but have never run across the definition.
>
>As for nps dropping drastically to 1/10th of it's normal value... That can
>happen in endgames with any engine due to heavy tablebase access, although it's
>not usually so drastic. You can tell if that's the case because of constant hard
>drive access (the hard drive activity light stays on). I've also seen some
>significant dropping of nps with the Shredder 8 Gambit engine, but again not so
>drastic, perhaps to 1/3rd of normal value. I haven't seen that happen with the
>native Shredder 8 engine, which is usually fairly constant speed in a particular
>position. There's also the possibility for the counter in some older engines to
>wrap back around to zero when it gets to a certain value, a large number which I
>don't recall offhand. That causes a big drop in nps, but it's only artifical -
>the speed hasn't actually slowed down.
>WP



A Principal Variation is (from your posting) this thing :
28.Kf2 f5 29.Ke1 a4 30.Ke2 Kf7 31.g4 fxg4 32.Rc4 dxc4 33.b3 axb3 34.Kd2 bxa2

A dramatical drop in nps during long analysis is often due to counter overflow,
especially when programmer mistakenly uses counters of wrong type
(e.g. 32 bit counters instead of 64 bit)

/Matthias.



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.