Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: legal move generator that is 20 times faster than Crafty

Author: Carlos del Cacho

Date: 16:13:48 07/03/01

Go up one level in this thread


...

>
>A little youthful exuberance isn't so bad.  I think there are a lot of mistakes
>on his page, but I also think despite his ego and incredible... *hyperbole* he's
>a pretty smart kid.  I think his move generator might be a valuable asset if he
>ever gets it perfected.

He surely is. And I have to admit that I like the idea, it's quite clever. The
only drawback I see is generating attack information from the reverse bitboard
approach. You can extract the bits and get the squares but I see the
reversed/normal bitboards as isolated entities. There's no easy way to merge the
attack information from a reverse bitboard with normal bitboards. That's
something to consider when you get to evaluating the board.

>
>He certainly knows a lot more about chess programming than I did when I was 16.

I knew nothing about programming at that age :)

>
>>>I would not be surprised if it was capable of that.  Doesn't mean it will play
>>>good chess though.
>>>
>>>A good move generator is a necessary condition for a world-beater program.  But
>>>it's nowhere near sufficient.
>>
>>I'd say all you need is a move generator. There are things that are much more
>>important and you can always go back to do the tweaking when you get something
>>that plays fine. And overoptimizing it is just a waste of time.
>
>Premature optimization is a tremendous source of evil.
>1st rule of optimization: "Don't do it."
>2nd rule of optimization (for experts only): "Don't do it yet."
>
>Maybe you can get by with a slow move generator.  I have never seen a program
>that plays excellent chess with an extremely slow move generator.

I've never seen a program play well only considering material evaluation.

>And I have
>seen programs with a decent move generator where a profiler reveals it is a
>bottleneck.  But all in all, the search is much more important than the move
>generator.  A 30x faster move generator with negamax and lame move ordering will
>get toasted by a good negascout algorithm with null-move and good move ordering.
>And the quality of the evaluation is probably more important than the speed of
>the move generator[1].
>
>[1] When asked, "How many moves do you see ahead?", Capablanca said: "One move -
>the best one."
>
>I wish I had his move generator.
>;-)

Is this one Capablanca engine open source? Who is the author? :)



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.