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Subject: Re: How fast should my program be?

Author: Dan Newman

Date: 23:45:37 05/03/00

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On May 03, 2000 at 18:17:15, Daniel Clausen wrote:

>Hi
>
>On May 03, 2000 at 10:20:14, Severi Salminen wrote:
>
>>Hi everybody!
>>
>>I would like to know how fast should my program reach (say) ply 8 from starting
>>position, using AB, no hash tables, no extensions, no null move pruning. Just
>>plain AB with ordering and very simple evaluation (material, mobility and
>>developement). How many nodes/second should my program access? I'm asking this
>>to see if my program has bad basic routines which I should improve before other
>>things. I am using an old Celeron (which lacks some inner cache), 300Mhz. How
>>fast are your programs?
>
>I don't know how much you did for your engine already, but in my engine I
>couldn't care less about speed for the time being. I'd consider it a waste
>of time to optimize eg the make-move part at the moment, because it will change
>quite a lot in the future I think. Of course after a while these changes will
>settle down a lil. This will be the time when I'll begin to optimize.
>Just my opinion of course.
>
>Kind regards,
> -sargon


This is probably good advice, but I've never been able to follow it.  I'm
usually optimizing, tweeking, and so forth as I go along.  I had about
decided to give up this compulsive tweeking as useless when I suddenly came
to the realization that it actually had some benefit--not in making the
code faster--but in finding bugs.  When you fiddle with code you have to
look at it closely, more closely than you would if you were simply reading
it.  I recently discovered a long standing (and very well hidden) bug this
way (which is what gave me this sudden insight :).

-Dan.



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