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Subject: Re: 0x88 and move generator speed

Author: Dan Newman

Date: 00:11:08 02/02/01

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On February 01, 2001 at 08:32:21, Severi Salminen wrote:

>>I calculate a "pseudo-attack" bitboard for sliders.  (That's a bitboard
>>that has a bit turned on for each enemy piece on which the slider is
>>bearing, ignoring any blocking pieces.)  Then I start extracting the
>>coordinates of the "victims".  For each such coordinate I test to see if
>>any pieces are blocking the attack using a blocking-mask bitboard which
>>has all the bits turned on for squares that lie between the attacker and
>>victim.  If no blockers are there, we have a real victim.
>>
>>I don't think this differs much in cost from rotated bitboards.  In
>>some cases it's probably faster (sparse board), in others it's probably
>>slower than rotated bitboards.  Even if rotated bitboards happen to be a
>>little faster generating captures, they will certainly slow down make()
>>and undo().
>
>It is hard for me to believe your system is faster than rotated bitboards (I
>might be wrong). But considering the fact that you make about 10% of the moves
>that you generate rotated bitboards should be faster in all cases. I tried to
>convince myself one month that rotated are not faster than non-rotated. The
>result was a 10-30% speedup after 6 hours of programming (it was really
>brainboiling task to figure out a good mapping scheme). Using simple lookup
>tables and a little assembly you can extract the horizontal, vertical and
>diagonal occupation info in a couple of  assembly instructions and with one
>table lookup you have the attackboard, voila! It would be "very" initeresting to
>see the results if you tried to convert your engine into rotated bitboard
>engine.
>
>Severi

You guys are beginning to convince me I need to try this out again.  It
seems everyone that has tried both has found rotated to be faster.  The
last time I visited rotated bitboards, though, they really put my brain
in a twist.  Retrofitting this will take me a lot longer than 6 hours
though...

-Dan.



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