Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 08:35:49 10/31/00
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On October 31, 2000 at 08:30:04, Steve Maughan wrote:
>In my chess program I use recursion to carry out the basic alpha beta search.
>However while on one of the Delphi newsgroup I was told that recursion is a
>source of significant inefficiency and that _ALL_ recursive algorithms can be
>converted into an iterative form that is generally faster. Upon searching the
>net I found this site:
>
>http://www.geocities.com/zabrodskyvlada/aat/a_recu.html
>
>This basically shows that the recursive version of a sort runs at half the speed
>of the alternative version. Moreover, thinking back I remember that Ed Schroder
>mentioned that he doesn't use recursion.
>
>How many people do use recusion?
>
>Is there any literature on non recursive alpha / beta?
>
>Has anyone done any comparisons between recursive and none recursive searches?
>
>Regards,
>
>Steve
Don't worry about the overhead of recursion, in a chess program it's almost
nothing.
And the recursive version is so much more easy to read, it's a very important
advantage.
I would not trust too much those recursive/non-recursive benchmarks. With a
little bit of manual optimizations, the recursive versions should be very close
to the iterative versions, unless the body of the recursion is empty...
Christophe
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