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Subject: Re: The Brick Wall

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 11:25:19 09/19/04

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On September 19, 2004 at 13:32:01, Michael Henderson wrote:

>On September 19, 2004 at 11:10:14, Stuart Cracraft wrote:
>
>>Hi -- I am looking for 2 or 3 beta testers who would receive
>>(full) source code to my program and in return would provide
>>input and comments about improving the search. They would
>>simply agree not to redistribute it and in fact discard it after
>>a week or two of looking at it (and commenting.) The program is in C,
>>5000 lines. The search and quiescence routines are 600 lines total.
>>
>>The reason I am considering this is due to hitting a brick wall at 249/300
>>on WAC for several weeks now and knowing there are things I just cannot
>>find or go further with. The above score is at 1 second per position on a
>>1ghz P3 with a small transposition table. I am told that 270-300 is considered
>>"good" for this time control on this test. On this same machine
>>at the same time setting, with WAC, Crafty gets 270/300.
>>
>>The kind of beta testers I'm looking for are experienced programmers
>>who have written their own program and it has long since graduated
>>from Win-at-Chess as a test suite, perhaps scoring 270 or above at
>>1 second per move on a Pentium III 1ghz or above. To them, WAC has
>>become ho-hum and in fact they are currently just sitting on their
>>laurels without a lot of major advances. Their program has "matured."
>>They see themselves as senior chess programmers helping less
>>experienced authors.
>>
>>What I would favor
>>
>>   1) beta tester with solid program agrees to simultaneous exchange
>>      of source code
>>
>>   --and--
>>
>>   2) beta tester agrees to seriously review the quiesce(), search(),
>>      store(), retrieve(), and iterate() functions.
>>
>>I am fine to sign any non-disclosure agreement.
>>
>>This is just an attempt to break through a brick wall.
>>
>>Stuart
>
>Ok this is really just a joke Stuart, but what results do you get for 2 second
>searches? If you do get better results, then a 2x slower solve rate nothing to
>be worried about esp if under 2 secs :)
>
>Michael

I see the joke and it is amusing. Humor is needed because I am feeling
down about the program, obviously.

However, with a small extension change today, the new result is now, finally
250/300 at 1 second per move on the PIII 1ghz with a 500,000 entry hash table
(don't ask why I can't increase this, or else I will answer!)

At 2 seconds per move it is 258/300.

So this is not a speedup issue. It is a search issue that is holding me back.
That's the point of my post.

There are things I'm doing that are wrong and I can no longer see them.

C'est la vie?

Stuart



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