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Subject: Re: General efficiency question

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 07:55:30 04/23/02

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On April 23, 2002 at 05:03:42, Sune Fischer wrote:

>In contrary to what many people suggests, I think one should not completely
>ignore optimizations. If you give it no thought at all, you quickly stand to
>lose a factor of 10 or worse.
>Things like generating the entire movelist and then sorting the entire movelist
>by some simple O(N^2) algorithm, and doing all this with a huge array being
>allocated on the fly is real bad, it will cost a lot of performance.

I think this is more under the heading of choosing better algorithms like other
people have suggested rather than minute decisions of whether to pass pointers
to all of your functions or whether to use global data.

You're right though, choosing the best algorithms and making wise decisions from
the beginning will get you a good efficient program. I think when people talk
about optimization they mean taking a good efficient program and tweaking
existing sections a bit to squeeze out a little more speed.

For example, using a piece array to avoid having to loop through 64 squares
(instead using 16 or fewer iterations vs. 64 iterations) isn't really considered
an optimization as much as it is simply a good idea, or maybe a "correct" or
"not wrong" idea.

Russell



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