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Subject: Re: Bitboard VS array board ,speed difference in movegen()

Author: Severi Salminen

Date: 08:36:43 02/27/01

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On February 27, 2001 at 10:23:08, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On February 26, 2001 at 16:21:15, Severi Salminen wrote:
>
>>>Note that in crafty I don't do the attack_to/attack_from stuff, I dynamically
>>>compute it as needed with the rotated bitmap table lookups...  that might make
>>>a difference.
>>
>>What is this attack_to/attack_from you are talking about? I do this in
>>gen_captures(bishop, for example): I take one white bishop from Board.Bishops.
>>Then I extract the necessary diagonal states which I use to get a bitboard which
>>has all bits on where a bishop might capture to. Then I AND this with black
>>pieces and scan through those. In make_move() I just move the pieces around and
>>update all bitboards. My board structure has only the necessary bitboards which
>>are needed to store the board and 3 rotated bitboards. So what are these
>>attack_to and _from bitboards and where are they used?
>>
>>Severi
>
>The original Slate/Atkin paper described their incremental move generator.  They
>maintained (for each piece) a bitmap that defined the squares that piece could
>move to.  Whenever the board was updated, the affected bitmaps were also
>updated.  This means that at any instant in time, you _always_ have a bitmap
>showing which piece attacks which squares.  They also incrementally updated the
>inverse bitmaps as well, those bitmaps that indicate which squares hold a piece
>that attacks one specific square.
>
>I did this in early versions of crafty, but the rotated bitmap approach soon
>made that approach obsolete...

Oh yes, I think I have read about this somewhere. Actually it was Levy's Chess
Computer Handbook. It introduced a move generator that only alters the list of
all possible moves if necessary. I think it would slow things down a lot.

Severi



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