Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 14:13:37 07/20/99
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On July 20, 1999 at 14:12:03, Andrew Williams wrote: >On July 20, 1999 at 12:12:14, Dann Corbit wrote: > >>I think it would be interesting to benchmark chess algorithms: >>0. Move generators -- all types >>1. Alpha-Beta vs MTD(f) >>2. Bitboards vs 0x88 >>3. etc. >> >>Prepare a large crosstable and do a large number of runs with as many >>implementations as possible and under as many different conditions as possible. >> >>Change the search time from very short searches (10 sec or less) up to half an >>hour to find the bit O(f(n)) properties of the algorithms. >> >>A systematic study might eliminate a lot of guesswork or even tell us *where* >>certain algorithms work better than others. For instance, we might use one >>algorithm at a certain time control and a different algorithm at a longer time >>control and yet another at correspondence chess time controls. > > >This is certainly an interesting proposition. I think (having read some of >the discussion below) that the best way to compare two approaches is in one >program. That minimizes the number of variables. Please measure things in a commercial program, at a bad program any change works of course. >But even with this there are difficulties. eg Having started the MTDF/PVS >discussion below (with a wholly innocent, and as yet still unanswered question), >I thought it might be useful to hack together a PVS implementation of my >program. I did this last night, and it works, after a fashion. But it's not >going to match my mtdf implementation unless I spend a *lot* of time on it. At >the moment my mtdf is much better than my pvs - but is that because I've got a >bug? Or could it be that I've not fully understood some of the subtleties of >pvs? Or is it that my carefully designed hash table, which suits my mtdf version >fine, is hindering my pvs version somehow? All I can say is that two years >working on mtdf gives me a better result than two hours on pvs - which isn't a >very revealing conclusion :) > >This isn't to say that it's not a worthwhile effort, so long as we all preface >our results with the phrase, "in *my* program..." Otherwise, we'll all just end >up arguing again. I've just had a very interesting conversation with Vincent on >ICC, where he said that calculating his attack-tables at the tips is much faster >for him than doing them incrementally. Whereas I've just spend several evenings >"proving" that in my program calculating them incrementally is much faster than >doing them at the tips :-) > > >regards > >Andrew
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