Author: Uri Blass
Date: 11:13:47 02/19/03
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On February 19, 2003 at 13:57:41, Dann Corbit wrote: >When you want to make your code faster, the most important thing is to find out >where it is slow. I don't know how familiar you are with profiling, but a good >profiler will show you a lot about your algorithms. On most programs, and >certaintly for chess programs, most of the time will be dominated by a few hot >spots. If you spend the effort on the hot spots, it will be enormously more >beneficial than in other places. > >Nuts and bolts tweaky sorts of things are fun to learn. But an adjustment to >the fundamental algorithm (if it is possible) is often dominatingly better than >that. > >So, my steps to make something faster are like this: >1. Profile to find the slow spots. >2. Examine and understand the algorithms in the slow places >3. Look for a better algorithm >4. If a better algorithm exists, try it >5. If a better algorithm does not exist, try to improve the existing algorithm >6. If still a slow spot, resort to tweaky sorts of things and inline assembly. > >One idea that is often helpful is to precompute as much as possible, and store >the results in a compact lookup table. Then the complex calculation becomes a >simple lookup. I know it. The point is that the better algorithm that I have is to write similiar functions to the functions that I have and when I write similiar functions I also think of optimizing the previous functions. Today I have not a function to generate only captures and I need to do it but it leads me to think again about my move generator and I find ideas that can do it faster. I do not do the things that will help most to the speed of my program because they may take time and I prefer first to see what I can improve relatively fast. I also think that evaluation of endgames is more important but I like more doing Movei faster because it is easier to test for bugs(if I get the same number of nodes then I know that I probably have no bugs). Uri
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