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Subject: Re: Rough comparison between rotated bitboards and 0x88

Author: Ed Schröder

Date: 00:17:10 06/21/00

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On June 20, 2000 at 17:54:29, Larry Griffiths wrote:

>On June 20, 2000 at 12:18:06, Ralf Elvsén wrote:
>
>>I'm asking about things I don't have much personal experience from
>>so forgive me if this is a stupid question. With BB, as I understand
>>it, one usually have a lot of precomputed BB-arrays, like bishopsMoves[square],
>>maybe blocks[from][to]  or the rotated BB-stuff. Is this causing problems
>>for the cache? How much precomputed stuff is needed in 0x88 compared to this?
>>
>>Ralf
>
>Ralf,
>
>I did experience slowdowns in my program due the precomputed bitboard arrays.

These large pre-computed bit-board tables you access so many times have
a negative effect on the PC's data-cache. So maybe the code you are writing
in theory looks (and should be) faster but in practice it is not. Same story
for the hash table lookup using multiple slots. Maybe 8 slots gives the best
performance in NPS but that doesn't automatically mean it will be faster
in time because these 8 tries are eating (ruining) the data cache.

I once rewrote a time consuming part of EVAL storing all possible results
in a pre-compiled table. 2-3 table lookups replaced a large piece of code.
I estimated the gain in speed on about 12-14%. In practice it was only 1%
faster. Reason was blowing up the data cache.

Isn't chess programming just great?

Ed



>You can go as crazy as you like creating all sorts of wonderful neat-o bitboard
>arrays consuming several megabytes of storage.  Been there, done that, pruned
>the bitboard stuff back :)
>
>I also pre-computed RookMoves (file and rank) using bitboards (WITHOUT USING A
>LOOP BY THE WAY).
>
>Larry.



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