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Subject: Re: Fine #70 and hash bug(s) (warning: long post)

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 12:02:23 04/20/04

Go up one level in this thread


On April 20, 2004 at 13:37:53, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On April 20, 2004 at 13:01:57, Dieter Buerssner wrote:
>
>>On April 20, 2004 at 12:52:47, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On April 20, 2004 at 11:50:29, Dieter Buerssner wrote:
>>>
>>>>On April 20, 2004 at 06:10:05, Omid David Tabibi wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>In his article "PEASANT: An endgame program for kings and pawns", Newborn
>>>>>writes: "Position 70 would require a 30-ply search (25,000 hours)"
>>>>
>>>>I did the experiment. A search without transposition tables, without
>>>>pruning/extensions and with material only eval (I forgot, if I used qsearch or
>>>>not). A pawn capture was found at depth 26 (after 8 hours, IIRC).
>>>
>>>I assume you mean depth=26, not ply=26?  IE white wins the pawn and I had
>>>thought that this happens on ply=27, which means the first ply of q-search.
>>
>>Correct. Also, I used a qsearch in that experiment.
>>
>>>I will try to run this myself as it would be nice to know exactly how deep this
>>>is precisely, verified by multiple programs...
>>>
>>>
>>>> With hash, it
>>>>is almost guaranteed, that you find it at lower depth. Every second ply, you
>>>>will have to search all moves, and many inferior moves will be refuted by seeing
>>>>the pawn capture earlier. These refutations will be in the HT, and will be
>>>>grabbed in the other more decent lines, to find the solution at lower depth.
>>>>
>>>>For my engine, even 1000 entries in the HT is enough, to solve the problem in
>>>>practically no time.
>>>
>>>Theoretically if you search a perfectly ordered tree, the hash table should not
>>>let you solve it at a shallower than normal depth, although it should cut the
>>>time dramatically as we all see...
>>
>>I don't agree here. See my argument, that every second ply, you have to search
>>all moves, and that this will help you, to find abbrevations (especially, or
>>perhaps only, when using fail soft search).
>
>If you search a perfectly ordered tree this can not possibly happen.  The first
>thing you search is the path toward the win.  Other sub-trees have not yet been
>searched and they can't influence the score.

If you use iterative deepening then it is possible that they were searched in
previous iteration so this argument does not convince me.

Uri



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