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Subject: Re: Basic questions regarding pawn hash

Author: Daniel Shawul

Date: 05:14:40 06/14/04

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On June 13, 2004 at 16:46:14, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On June 13, 2004 at 14:24:57, GeoffW wrote:
>
>>Hi
>>
>>I was thinking how I would add pawn hashing to my program. Having read a little
>>of the Crafty source I have a rough grasp of the idea, however there are a
>>couple of things I am hazy on.
>>
>>Q1)
>>I understand the pawn hash score stored must not contain any piece related
>>scoring as that must be factored in later. In my program even the simple choice
>>of which pawn position look up table is determined by the phase of the game, i.e
>>it will be piece dependent. How would I get over that obstacle ? Score the pawns
>>for end game, opening and  middle in the hash, and choose which one to use later
>>?
>
>I don't store any scores at all in the pawn hash table, but just lots of
>computations
>which is used by the evaluation function.  I store things like the location of
>all
>passed, isolated, double or backward pawns, pawn chains, number of pawns on
>black/white squares for both sides, a classification of the centre (open,
>closed,
>semi-closed, etc.), and so on.
>
>>Q2)
>>Crafty uses an 8 bit bitmap to store file for passers, this is ok for a bitboard
>>program as it is probably trivial to find the exact location later. However for
>>a non bitboard program it is non trivial to find the exact locations. Do I have
>>any alternative but to store the passer locations in the hash ? That would be 16
>>bytes just for the passed pawns for both sides?
>
>My program also doesn't use bitboards.  I simply store all the exact locations.
>This is not a problem, you can afford to use lots of space for your pawn hash
>table entries.  My entries are 128 bytes big.  Keep in mind that the number of

I totally agree with you.Neither the size of the entry nor the number of entries
seems to bring a significant difference. I suddenly increased the entry size by
2 big arrays (20 bytes),and i didn't notice significant slow down. My prog now
uses 2M(65536 entries) by default.

daniel

>pawn structures seen in a single search isn't very big, and that this means that
>you don't need to store a big number of entries.  I found that increasing the
>pawn hash table size beyond 256 entries gave only a tiny increase in speed
>(about 3%, IIRC).
>
>Tord



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