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Subject: Re: a bitboard question

Author: Larry Griffiths

Date: 08:08:21 01/14/01

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On January 14, 2001 at 00:36:52, Uri Blass wrote:

>I am interested to know what is the fastest way that is known to evaluate
>mobility in bitboard when the definition of mobility is the weight of the number
>of squares that the pieces control.
>
>For example if a bishop at c1 controls the squares d2,e3,f4,b2,a3 then the
>mobility of it is
>weightbis[d2]+weightbis[e3]+weightbis[f4]+weightbis[b2]+weightbis[a3] when
>weightbis is an array(I can call it a mobility square table).
>
>I am interested to know if bitboard is faster or slower than other ways to
>calculate this evaluation.
>
>Uri

Im glad you posted this Uri.  My previous program generated all the captures and
moves and used the total count as a mobility value.  This worked pretty well but
it wanted to move the queen out early in the opening because it can move to so
many squares.  I had to penalize the queen for moving in the opening to stop
this.  I am missing this function with my current bitboard version as I do not
extract all the moves from the bitboards.  I extract the captures, then extract
the moves if a cutoff does not occur.  I do generated both a capture bitboard
and a move bitboard during move generation, so I am thinking of maybe or'ing all
the capture and move bitboards for each piece together and then counting the
bits in the result bitboard, using it as an indicator of mobility.  I would have
to use QSearch to determine if pieces are on proper squares so that tactical
battles are not lost.

I have a MinMax function that can produce over 2 million move
generate/make/unmakes per second, but that number falls down to about 200,000 a
second when I add cuttoff's, hashing, evaluation etc.  I am convinced that a
good evaluation function is important, and mobility is certainly a factor to be
considered.

Keep posting and let me know if you find and goodies :)

Larry.



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