How to speed up my engine

[lauriet]

So it looks 'roughly' like the hash table gives you about a 2/1 speed up at around depth 10....or about 1 to 2 extra ply for the same time.
Have i interpreted this correctly ?

Laurie

[lauriet]

So at depth 10 the hash version takes about half the time. Do people think this and the previous post is a typical result (all things being equal).
If i implement a hash table my engine would reach the same depth in about half the time.
If it did, it would still not have time to search the next ply fully since my branching factor would impeed this ???

Laurie

[lauriet]

So at depth 10 the hash version takes about half the time. Do people think this and the previous post is a typical result (all things being equal).
If i implement a hash table my engine would reach the same depth in about half the time.
If it did, it would still not have time to search the next ply fully since my branching factor would impeed this ???

Laurie

[Angrim]

No transposition table.

Laurie

All of the rest is minor details. Transposition tables are important.

Ben

[sje]

Move generation for check evasion

I may have missed the answer, but have you implemented move generation explicitly designed for check evasion? This can provide a tremendous speed-up for nodes where the king is in check with only a very few legal moves but otherwise with dozens of illegal moves which have to be made and unmade -- that a big waste.

[lauriet]

Thats a good point. At the moment I have a legal move generator, which checks each generated move to see if the king is still in check.......this appears to be dumb, so I will work on changing this AND then your suggestion will help from there on in.


Laurie.

[hgm]

Actually the fraction of nodes where you are in check is quite negligible, so whatever you do there will hardly impact overall performance. But you might still have to do some extra testing for checks if your normal test for seeing if you can capture the King uses shortcuts that would not be justified if the King was already under attack.

[Henk]

Why do you want a faster engine ? There are already fast engines enough.

[Henk]

Maybe there should be more tournaments for slow engines that beginner or moderate chess players can watch.

[hgm]

I agree. The ChessWar promo division was the most fun of all to watch. Things like TCEC are utterly boring, if you are not an engine yourself.