Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 06:18:49 01/07/04
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On January 07, 2004 at 07:45:00, Vasik Rajlich wrote: >I more or less agree with this, but there is one caveat: when you first begin, >you have to decide whether to use bitboards or not. If you don't, you'll never >switch to them without a complete rewrite. Based on my experience so far I would >strongly recommend using bitboards. They are not that complicated, they were not >so difficult to debug (as I had slightly feared), and quite a number of >evaluation terms can be very elegantly & efficiently expressed with them. This is all true, but you could say precisely the same about any other board representation. Bitboards are neither better nor worse than other board representations, only different. There are many examples to prove that it is possible to write super strong engines both with and without bitboards. As far as I know, the majority of the top engines (including The King, Chess Tiger, Rebel, Hiarcs and Junior, if I recall correctly) are non-bitboarders. Ultimately, the strength of your engine does not depend on the board representation. I am doing a complete rewrite of my engine at the moment, but I still don't use any bitboards. My main reasons to avoid them is that they are somewhat tricky (though of course not impossible) to use with unusual board shapes and sizes (my engine will play Glinski's hexagonal chess as well as normal chess), that they are difficult to make efficient on 32-bit processors with limited memory available (like on most handheld units). Tord
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