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Subject: Re: Bitboard question

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 22:34:39 05/26/02

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On May 26, 2002 at 23:41:51, Randall Jouett wrote:

>I would think that hash tables (i.e., not
>having to re-evaluate the tree) and good heuristics in
>EvaluatePosition() are where the true benifits would lay.
>In other words, I think we'd all much rather have a great
>heuristic that was slow that a bad heuristic that was fast :^).

Hello Randal. Glad to see that you joined us here :)

If you are using alpha-beta, which I assume every engine is (or some variation
of it), then the main goal is to reduce the branching factor. Dan Corbit pointed
out to me once that when you go from a high branching factor to a lower one
(even slightly lower), the machine running the engine with the lower branching
factor could be significantly slower than the machine running the engine with
the higher branching factor, and the slower machine would out search the faster
one. That's why Chess Tiger for the Palm PC can beat a lot of the amateur
programs that are run on hardware 20 times faster than it, because it's move
ordering and branching factor are incredible (so I've heard).

Russell



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