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Subject: Re: 50 move/rep draws + hash table problems

Author: Pham Hong Nguyen

Date: 01:52:26 08/14/04

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On August 14, 2004 at 03:12:27, Michael Henderson wrote:

>I'm having trouble understanding how the hash table creates "unsolvable" path
>info problems for 50 move/rep draw detection.  Could you avoid storing draw
>scores, and check for draws before checking hash to solve this?  Or is the
>problem somewhere else and I am not seeing this...which I am sure of :) Null
>move probably contributes its share of errors here too so I probably won't worry
>about it.
>
>Michael

If you search on r.g.c.c. you can find some examples and explanations of Dr.
Hyatt and Bruce about this problem. The site of Bruce Moreland is also an
excellent source about this.

I will give you one more example:
Suppose at a position you have three available moves A, B, C and they can gain
scores of -10, 5, 30.

When searching this position first time, suppose your engine finds that move C
is a draw by rule (50 move/3 rep) so it returns 0 instead of 30. Hence, your
engine thinks that the best move is B with score of 5 and save this value into
hash table. Now, whenever you engine see this position again it gets a wrong
score of 5 from hash table event though C is not a draw move in the new
situations.

From above example, you can see that your engine did not save directly the value
of 0 into hash table but still got bad effects. Thus, storing draw or not is not
a solution for this problem.

Pham




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