Eliminate ONE_PLY

Simplification that eliminates ONE_PLY, based on a suggestion in the forum that
support for fractional plies has never been used, and @mcostalba's openness to
the idea of eliminating it. We lose a little bit of type safety by making Depth
an integer, but in return we simplify the code in search.cpp quite significantly.

No functional change

------------------------------------------

The argument favoring eliminating ONE_PLY:

* The term “ONE_PLY” comes up in a lot of forum posts (474 to date)
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/fishcooking/ONE_PLY%7Csort:relevance

* There is occasionally a commit that breaks invariance of the code
with respect to ONE_PLY
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/fishcooking/ONE_PLY%7Csort:date/fishcooking/ZIPdYj6k0fk/KdNGcPWeBgAJ

* To prevent such commits, there is a Travis CI hack that doubles ONE_PLY
and rechecks bench

* Sustaining ONE_PLY has, alas, not resulted in any improvements to the
  engine, despite many individuals testing many experiments over 5 years.

The strongest argument in favor of preserving ONE_PLY comes from @locutus:
“If we use par example ONE_PLY=256 the parameter space is increases by the
factor 256. So it seems very unlikely that the optimal setting is in the
subspace of ONE_PLY=1.”

There is a strong theoretical impediment to fractional depth systems: the
transposition table uses depth to determine when a stored result is good
enough to supply an answer for a current search. If you have fractional
depths, then different pathways to the position can be at fractionally
different depths.

In the end, there are three separate times when a proposal to remove ONE_PLY
was defeated by the suggestion to “give it a few more months.” So… it seems
like time to remove this distraction from the community.

See the pull request here:
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2289
This commit is contained in:
Brian Sheppard
2019-09-28 16:27:23 -04:00
committed by Stéphane Nicolet
parent 328bdd0947
commit ca7d4e9ac7
7 changed files with 86 additions and 100 deletions

View File

@@ -56,9 +56,6 @@ script:
- make clean && make -j2 ARCH=x86-32 optimize=no debug=yes build && ../tests/signature.sh $benchref
- make clean && make -j2 ARCH=x86-32 build && ../tests/signature.sh $benchref
# Verify bench number is ONE_PLY independent by doubling its value
- sed -i'.bak' 's/.*\(ONE_PLY = [0-9]*\),.*/\1 * 2,/g' types.h
- make clean && make -j2 ARCH=x86-64 build && ../tests/signature.sh $benchref
#
# Check perft and reproducible search
- ../tests/perft.sh