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Subject: Re: programmers: pawn hash tables

Author: Peter McKenzie

Date: 23:42:00 03/08/03

Go up one level in this thread


On March 09, 2003 at 01:14:12, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On March 09, 2003 at 00:35:49, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On March 08, 2003 at 23:34:35, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On March 08, 2003 at 12:05:59, Russell Reagan wrote:
>>>
>>>>On March 08, 2003 at 09:41:18, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Sure you can.  You can evaluate all the pawn-only stuff, and then you can
>>>>>pre-cmpute whatever you need such as passed pawn locations, weak pawn locations,
>>>>>weak square locations, open file locations, half-open-file locations, and so
>>>>>forth.  You stuff that in the pawn hash table, and then use it when you evaluate
>>>>>pieces to get the "coordination".
>>>>
>>>>I wonder if it would be faster (or reasonable) to keep track of this stuff
>>>>incrementally. For example, from the starting position, you know that if a pawn
>>>>makes a capture, or is captured, then that file is half open. So you can keep
>>>>track of how many captures have been made to or from a file, and keep track of
>>>>isolated pawns that way. I guess using a pawn hash would still be faster or more
>>>>generally useful, and as with all things incrementally updated, you do some
>>>>wasted updating computations where you may not use it.
>>>
>>>
>>>This is a tough thing to figure out.  IE incremental updates cost something.
>>>You hope it costs less than computing from scratch, which it generally does if
>>>done well.  But if you start to search pretty deeply, then the payoff drops
>>>off quickly, as you keep re-updating the incremental stuff multiple times
>>>before you use it once when you reach the tips.
>>
>>1)It is the case only if you do not evaluate every node and there are programs
>>that do it
>>Rebel does it and movei also does it.
>>
>>Rebel does not do incremental evaluation but the reason is not that it is
>>impossible to do it but the fact that Ed found it difficult to do it without
>>bugs.
>>
>>2)The original question was about comparing incremental updating to pawn hash
>>tables.
>>I assume that for pawn structure, hash tables are faster because you may get
>>almost 100% hits.
>>
>>Uri
>
>Yep.  Even with a hash size of _one_, you can get decent results, because

Thats something I'd never considered before but its a pretty cool observation!

On the general question of pawn hash tables, I'm with you Bob.  Very useful,
very cheap, very fast, a rare combination in computer chess!

>the same pawn structure happens in successive positions many times.



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