Pawn Hash

[Philou]

Hi

I just want to know if pawn hash increase speed very much

Have a good day

[Mincho Georgiev]

Properly implemented, it's definitely worth it.

[MattieShoes]

Depends on how costly your pawn evaluation is...

[hgm]

That depends on how complex your pawn evaluation is. If that issimple enough, the pawn hash will only slow you down.

[Kempelen]

For my engine it has been a notable increase, I noticed but not measured

[Aaron Becker]

I think the real advantage is that it lets you do much more expensive pawn analysis without affecting performance. For example, my engine uses an 0x88 board data structure, but I build a pawn bitboard during the pawn evaluation that comes in very handy. Without pawn hashing this would be way too expensive to be worthwhile and I'd just do something cheaper and less nice, but because of pawn hashing it has almost no overhead.