Author: frank phillips
Date: 05:21:50 07/15/98
Thanks to those who responded. There are some interesting pointers and most of all encouragement. Tom asked about node-rate. I will do the test he suggested of how many nodes it takes to a reach a ply. The current node rate is around 40k nps in the starting position, rising to up to 70k nps or so in the endgame: where a node is a call to the quiescent search function or a call to Negamax that is not also a call to Quiescent (ie nodes are counted in Negamax only after the if(depth>=maxdepth) Quiescent(....); bit). Don indicated that there are no big leaps just lots of small improvements that add up. This is useful to know. I obviously have an awful lot of small steps to take. At the moment I bring a local array of structures into existence at each incarnation of the search functions. It is of fixed size - int MoveT move[MAX] - which is gross and may be slowing things down. I will move to a global stack array and pointers next. You guys seem to have been born genetically imprinted with the null move, killer heuristic, hash table, bitboards etc concepts :-) As a complete beginner I have found it difficult to get hold of material describing these techniques and was looking for references.- is there a relevant FAQ somewhere? There are few books on computer chess and those mentioned here seem to be out of print. Perhaps the answer is back issues of the ICCA journal - but hopefully not them all. (Are they suitable for only the experienced expert?) . Without the net and the help of members of CCC I would not have even taken my first step. Frank
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