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Subject: Why bitboards at all?

Author: John Coffey

Date: 17:50:11 06/19/00

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On June 19, 2000 at 19:48:36, Larry Griffiths wrote:

>I have found bitboards to be an even trade-off on my Pentium system.  I have to
>update about 6 bitboards when a piece moves and this generates a lot of
>instructions.  I get it back in my IsKingInCheck code so it evens out.  I like
>to have fast move generation code, but most of my gains have been through
>alpha-beta, hash-table, killer-move and movelist ordering etc.
>
>Larry.


Maybe I am too much of a novice, but I don't see yet why I should convert over
to bitboards.  Is move generation faster?  If so, why?  My program scans the
board and uses simple loops to generate moves.  Do you not have to do loops
with bitboards?   Now I can understand why evaluation might be faster with
bitboards because you can & and | your way through things.   But I am trying
to evaluate the control of squares which I am not sure how to do with bitboards.
 I am experimenting with an incremental evaluation function that evaluates the
base position and makes changes to that evaluation as the position changes.
This is expensive, but my whole approach of evaluating
square control would be very expensive if I did it at the leaves.

I am sure somewhere on the net is a really good explanation of bitboards.

John Coffey



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