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Subject: Re: Why bitboards at all?

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 11:07:39 06/20/00

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On June 19, 2000 at 21:32:56, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On June 19, 2000 at 20:50:11, John Coffey wrote:
>
>>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?
>
>Not to generate moves, No. You generate all the sliding piece moves with two
>table lookups...

Hmmm. I do table lookups all over my program, and none of them seem to be
generating any moves...
The fact is that you DO need to loop to generate moves in a bitboard program.
Maybe it's not the same loop, but it's still a loop.

-Tom



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