Forum Archive : GNU Backgammon

Cache size From:   Ned Cross Address:   nedc@cedarcomm.com Date:   4 March 2004 Subject:   Re: OLM 27Feb04: Kit's move - GNU rollout Forum:   GammOnLine My next GNU question concerns the cache size. Presumably quite a few positions may arise multiple times in a long rollout, and so having those positions cached should yield a speed improvement. Has anyone experimented with this, or developed guidelines for how big to set GNU's cache (settings/options/other/cache size)? Robert-Jan Veldhuizen  writes: Yep, the position cache stores 0-ply evaluations from positions, directly based on the NN output. It gives a good speed increase but don't expect any miracles. Especially with long (full) rollouts not many positions will repeat in a rollout. Often it's most effective for the first moves from a position, where the chance of a transposition is highest. As such I think the effect is most noticable when doing 3-ply and 4-ply evaluations (after you already did the 2-ply one). But for simple positions rollouts can also profit significantly. As for the size of the cache, I'd say set it as high as you can afford with the amount of RAM you have. If you set it too high and it doesn't fit in RAM anymore, disk swapping will start and this will slow down the rollout to a crawl! It should also be noted that as usual, the speed increase from a larger cache diminishes once the cache is basically large enough. So, there's no need to make it extremely large or something, but you might gain something if it's currently set much lower than you can afford with the RAM you have. You can get statistics from gnubg on its cache usage; this might help you to find a decent cache size and get an idea about the effectiveness of it: give the text command show cache. Currently mine is set very large at 2,000,000 entries, which takes about 100MB of RAM. This way I can still comfortably run 2 or 3 instances of gnubg with 512MB of RAM. However a much smaller cache size (say 10 times smaller) is just marginally slower as far as I could tell. I wonder if any other people did some testing with this? Perhaps at some point enlarging the cache makes things slower even, because of overhead?   Did you find the information in this article useful?           Do you have any comments you'd like to add?

 

GNU Backgammon

Analyzing GamesGrid matches  (Roy Passfield, Dec 2001) 

Batch analysis tool  (Øystein Johansen, June 2004) 

Cache size  (Ned Cross+, Mar 2004) 

Compiling for Windows  (Øystein Johansen, Jan 2002) 

Edit mode removing checker from bar  (Scott Steiner+, May 2003) 

Entering an annotated match  (Albert Silver, Dec 2003) 

Error rates: Gnu vs. Snowie  (Raccoon, Mar 2006) 

Even-ply/odd-ply effect  (Raccoon, Nov 2004) 

Even-ply/odd-ply effect  (Tom Keith+, Oct 2003) 

Even-ply/odd-ply effect  (Scott Steiner+, Dec 2002) 

Filter settings  (Robert-Jan Veldhuizen, Nov 2004) 

Gnu 0.13 versus Jellyfish and Snowie  (Torsten Schoop, Aug 2003) 

Gnu 0.13 vs. Snowie 4  (Albert Silver, June 2003) 

Gnu 0.14 vs. Jellyfish  (Michael Howard+, July 2003) 

Gnu versus Snowie and Jellyfish  (Michael Depreli, Oct 2005) 

How luck factor is calculated  (Gregg Cattanach, Aug 2002) 

How rollouts work  (Gary Wong, July 1999) 

How to enter an illegal move  (Øystein Johansen, Aug 2003) 

Importing .gam files  (PAR+, Mar 2005) 

Importing PartyGammon matches  (rew+, July 2006) 

Improving your game using GnuBG  (D.U.G.+, Nov 2002) 

Installing on Windows  (maareyes, Oct 2001) 

Interpreting JSD's  (Adrian Wright+, Feb 2005) 

JSD's and confidence intervals  (Daniel Murphy+, Jan 2005) 

Logging rollouts  (Øystein Johansen, Oct 2004) 

Luck rate  (Kees van den Doel+, May 2002) 

MWC versus Equity (EMG)  (Ken+, Apr 2005) 

Manually entering first roll  (Andreas Graf+, Apr 2005) 

Match equity tables  (Raccoon, July 2005) 

Personal reflections  (Louis Nardy Pillards, Sept 2002) 

Playing two computers against each other  (Stanley E. Richards+, Mar 2008) 

Python scripting  (Øystein Johansen+, Nov 2004) 

Quasi-random dice in rollouts  (Ian Shaw, Mar 2004) 

Question marks in game list  (Jim Segrave, July 2005) 

Questions and answers  (Jim Segrave+, Jan 2003) 

Questions and answers  (Jørn Thyssen, Aug 2002) 

Restarting a rollout with different settings  (Jim Segrave, Apr 2005) 

Restarting a rollout with different settings  (Robert-Jan Veldhuizen, Apr 2004) 

Rollout settings  (geoff arnold+, Apr 2007) 

Rollout settings  (Stick+, Nov 2005) 

Rollout settings  (Robert-Jan Veldhuizen, Mar 2004) 

Rollout settings  (Ian Dunstan, Aug 2003) 

Rollout settings for the impatient  (Robert-Jan Veldhuizen, June 2004) 

Running rollouts in background  (Bruce+, Apr 2004) 

Saving rollout results from command-line interface  (Jeremy Bagai+, Apr 2006) 

Saving rollouts  (Mislav Radica+, May 2006) 

Setting GnuBG's playing strength  (JP White, Sept 2001) 

Setting skill level  (Jim Segrave, Apr 2004) 

Setting up and saving a rollout  (Albert Silver, Dec 2003) 

What's GNU?  (Gary Wong, Oct 2001) 

Which player is player 0?  (Neil Kazaross+, Oct 2004) 

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