Author: Dan Newman
Date: 19:14:11 05/14/98
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On May 14, 1998 at 19:15:24, Bruce Moreland wrote: >There is probably some guy out there working furiously on a program, and >his big angle is that he does floating point math in just the right >spots, or so he thinks. > >On all the micros that I know of, you should use integers if you can. >Most chess programs are extreme examples of optimization, so they'll >tend to not use floating point at all. > >If there is a processor where floating point is faster, or some >combination of floating point and integer is fastest, there is some >lunatic out there right now writing floating point chess program code in >assembly language. > >And if the assembler doesn't do exactly what he wants, he'll input the >op-codes by hand into a hex editor. > >bruce I once tried using FP math in one of my earlier chess programs--but for the score arithmetic only. My idea was this: that the Pentium processor could do floating point arithmetic in parallel with the integer, and so I might get increased performance this way. IIRC, the resultant code was a bit slower--but not by much. I don't really know why it didn't work. Perhaps I should blame the code generated by the compiler. Or perhaps the floating point was so much slower that it dominated... (Maybe I should try it again on the P6--though a 32-bit floater is a bit big for storing in a hash table.) -Dan.
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