🚀 go-pugleaf

As Mark Phillips points out below, problems with the persistent
transposition table (hashfile) can also cause gnuchess to crash or
hang after it gets out of its opening book.

I believe there is no concurrency control on the hashfile, so multiple
copies of gnuchess trying to modify it simultaneously might corrupt
it.  This is especially true if you are trying to use it from multiple
machines over NFS.

The gnuchess man page still says:

	Tests run so far show that it plays no worse with the hashfile
	than without, but it is not clear yet whether it provides a
	real advantage. 

So I personally see no reason to use the hashfile.

	--Tim

------- Forwarded Message

From: M.S.Phillips@bnr.co.uk
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 16:31:47 +0100
To: mann (Tim Mann)
Subject: Re: What's causing this?
Message-ID: <9309281532.12846@bhars217.bnr.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: mann@src.dec.com's message of 24 Sep 1993 04:02:54 GMT

One reason gnuchess (4.0 pl62) can crash when it finishes playing from
the opening book is that it is trying to use a corrupt hashfile.

You need to either install a binary hash file created by "gnuchess -c
n" (where n specifies the size - see the man page) OR just don't
install a hash file at all!

Not installing the hash file may be a good idea if more than one
person runs that copy of gnuchess because all users require read/write
access to it and it is (often very) large.

Mark Phillips


------- End of Forwarded Message