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Subject: Re: KN/s question...

Author: Gerd Isenberg

Date: 13:13:00 10/26/05

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On October 26, 2005 at 07:01:10, Rick Hagen wrote:

>
>Hi,
>
>I am running a 8-pawn tournament and I noticed something that surprised me a
>bit.
>The set-position is pretty well known I guess:
>
>[D]4k3/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/4K3 w - - 0 1
>
>I did a check with various engines:
>First number is from the starting postition, second from 8-pawn position:
>
>                KN/s
>Junior 9        1460    1415
>Hiarcs 9         218     430
>Shredder 9       365     620
>CT 15            435     580
>Toga II 1.0      760    1355
>Fritz 7         1000     645
>Fritz 9          930     540
>Crafty 19.15     865     855
>Pro Deo 1.1      735    1100
>
>P3 3Ghz
>HT 128 MB
>TBs off (Not installed atm...)
>
>So, my question: who are the "odd" ones out, and why?
>
>Thanks,
>Rick


A few aspects on your interesting nps-compare:

The ratio of the number of expensive nodes versus cheap nodes during a search
and the (average) ratio of the implementation depending duration of expensive
nodes (full eval, all-nodes) versus cheap nodes (repetition detection, lazy eval
cuts at leaves, etc.) might be the main factor to explain the nps behaviour.

The ratio of expensive nodes versus cheap nodes is depending on the position and
of course on the implementation of the engine. If we use forward pruning to cut
futile subtrees, we have relative more expensive nodes. If we, probably
depending on the state of the game, don't use futility pruning (but probably
lazy eval), we will have relative more cheap nodes.

More hashhits, better move-ordering favours expensive nodes and therefor lower
nps. Also some extension (and reduction) effects may cause the engine to have
more cheap or lazy eval-cuts at the leaves.

There are a lot of other things of course, pawn-hashing, eval-hashing,
move-generation, incremental verus on the fly attack or move-generation, legal
versus pseudolegal movegen and whatever else...

Movegen and attack generation is usually faster in endings with no sliding
pieces also due to less pieces to generate moves for.

More sophisticated search statistics would be interesting.
Eg. about the number of fullsearch-, [pre[pre]...]-frontier-, horizon- and
qsearch-nodes, differentiated by foreward cuts (hashhit-cuts, nullmove-cuts,
(lazy)eval-cuts, etc.) and beta cuts and beta cuts after first move.

Gerd



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