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Subject: Re: High performance move generation

Author: Eugene Nalimov

Date: 11:27:37 11/16/99

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Unroll the outer loop, so that iDelta[iDir] become a compile-time constant in
the inner loop. Also, you now have 2 calls to AddMove - replace it by one, write
something like that:

  for (iTarg = x+17; ONBOARD(iTarg); iTarg += 17) {
    iTargContents = PIECE_AT(psPos, iTarg);
    if (IS_YOUR_COLOR(iTargContents))
      break;
    AddMove(psPos, x, iTarg);
    if (!IS_EMPTY(iTargContents))
      break;
    }

I suspect that ONBOARD(), PIECE_AT(), IS_EMPTY(), etc. are macro. Right? Also,
try to inline AddMove().

In any case the move generation performance is not very important - but you know
that yourself :-).

Eugene

On November 16, 1999 at 00:26:17, Scott Gasch wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have been rewriting my engine from the ground up and trying to "do it right"
>this second go 'round.  For instance, I pruned the move data struct from a huge
>56 byte struct down to an int to increase performance ;)
>
>I have recently been doing Vincent Diepeveen's test of move generation speed to
>clock how fast my generator is.  In the prior version it generated at about 3
>million nodes/sec whereas in this version (with the much smaller move
>representation) it is up to about 6 million nodes/sec on my AMD K6-3 450.
>
>Vincent's test is to generate all successors of:
>rnbqkbnr/ppp2ppp/8/3pp3/3PP3/8/PPP2PPP/RNBQKBNR b KQkq e6 0 0
>
>in a loop, 2000000 times and keep track of how long it takes... then compute
>nodes/sec.  Vincent gets 15 million in the same position with a slower
>processor!
>
>I have profiled my code and determined that the bottleneck is in my generation
>routines (as opposed to AddMove)  So my question is this: I currently generate
>moves for a specific piece something like this:
>
>    //
>    // Figure out how the rook can move.
>    //
>    for (iDir = 0; iDir < 4; iDir++)
>    {
>        iTarg = x + iDelta[iDir];
>        while (ONBOARD(iTarg))
>        {
>            iTargContents = PIECE_AT(psPos, iTarg);
>
>            //
>            // The rook can move if the square is empty.
>            //
>            if (IS_EMPTY(iTargContents))
>            {
>                AddMove(psPos, x, iTarg);
>            }
>
>            //
>            // Or if there is an enemy piece there to capture.
>            //
>            else
>            {
>                if (COLOR(iTargContents) != COLOR(iRook))
>                {
>                    AddMove(psPos, x, iTarg);
>                }
>                break;
>            }
>            iTarg += iDelta[iDir];
>        }
>    }
>
>However I see in GNUChess they use some kind of precomputed table.  I am not
>sure I understand exactly how this works.  Also, does anyone else have any other
>tricks to speed up move generation?  I know that in the long run this really
>doesn't make TOO much of a difference but I want my new version to be lean and
>mean...
>
>As always, I appreciate the help.
>Scott



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