Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: High performance move generation

Author: Daniel Clausen

Date: 12:08:36 11/16/99

Go up one level in this thread


Hi

On November 16, 1999 at 03:08:52, blass uri wrote:

[snip]

>I think that the result is not a good test because there can be different
>definitions of nodes
>It is easy by generating illegal moves to generate more nodes.
>
>I think it is more interesting to know how much time you need to generate all
>the legal moves and not to repeat the same moves but to generate a tree of all
>the possible legal games of 3 moves of both sides.

I think this speed has a similar quality like NPS. But if you tune your own
move generator you can compare it with an older version. So I think the test
is at least a lil useful. (No pun intended :)

Some points:

 -Generating legal moves: some engines only produce legal moves, others call
  Search() first and then notice the resulting position is illegal. So we have
  at least an additional MakeMove() call here.

 -The "output" of the MoveGenerator is not really defined. Ie my move-generator
  could do nothing, and the call GetNextMoveFromPool() could do all the work.
  Is my movegenerator now blindingly fast? :)
  Or with bitboards: Is the 'unroll' of a bitboard into ints (whereever the
  bit in the bitboard is '1') done in the move-generator or later?

 -Sorting: Maybe your move-generator automatically sorts the moves it generates
  and mine doesn't. (Or at least some kind of pre-sort is possible)

 -Some people (like me:) have move generation split into GenerateCapMoves()
  and GenerateNonCapMoves(). In this test this is a disadvantage whereas in
  practice it can speed up move generation since often you don't have to
  generate the non-cap moves.

The list goes on and on, but I don't have more time now since the pizza is
ready. [Hey, a mathematician became famous for a similar comment! =)]

Kind regards,
 -sargon



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.