Pondering about king positions in pawn hash

iCE 1.0 calculates a hash for the pawn structure and caches it. This is very efficient because different somehow related chess positions share the same pawn structure and evaluation terms related only to the positions of the pawns (e.g. isolated pawns) must not be evaluated again.

I'm now thinking about adding more pawn structure related terms to my evaluation, however terms that only depend on the pawn structure are limited. The king pawn shelter could be a pawn structure related term but it depends also on the king position. The same pawn structure will produce a different results for the shelter depending on the location of the king  (after king side or queen side castling). Only if I add the king position to the hash I can evaluate the pawn shelter. But there is a downside. The amount of hash hits and so the efficiency of the cache will decrease.

In order to visualize the effect I selected a number of positions and recorded the number of hash hits with and without including the king positions in the hash.

Successful hash hits with and without king positions in the hash

So it shows that for typical mid game positions there is an about 4% drop in the hit rate. All the features I'm now able to put into the hash additionally must compensate this 4% drop.

I have to try it out.