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Subject: Re: Reversed vs. Rotated Bitboards

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 01:38:41 01/29/02

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On January 29, 2002 at 02:51:53, Marcus Heidkamp wrote:

>On January 28, 2002 at 10:48:59, Sune Fischer wrote:
>
>>On January 28, 2002 at 10:28:32, Marcus Heidkamp wrote:
>>
>
>[snipped]
>
>>>Conclusion: My advice would be to live with as few as possible memory based
>>>variables, and reversed bitboards are just too many.
>>>
>>>Marcus
>>
>>I agree, but I don't follow. The idea of reversed bitboard is _not_ to use
>>lookup tables but instead do some extra operations.
>>
>>-S.
>
>As far as I understand the reversed bitboard approach, you need additional
>bitboards for the different directions of occupied squares to store the game
>position - at least four more bitboards. This will make the move generator
>slower, at least, that is what I think. I already try to avoid the lookup tables
>like the plague... :-)

Yes, I think you need 4 occupied boards, one for each color in both directions.
However you also need 4 sets of rotated I believe, and when you update a rotated
occupied board you _again_ need to do a lookup. No table lookup is needed for
the reversed, the square transformation is so simple: 63-sq.

I think all these table lookups for rotated is burning bandwidth at an
incredible rate, it is why I think reversed is overall faster.
On multiprocessor systems it may be even more significant.

>But we should remember that move generation by itself is only a small part of
>the total computation time required by a chess engine. I just do the assembler
>stuff for fun, it really won't help a lot for the whole engine.
>
>Marcus

That is true, if you already spend 90% of the time in evaluation, this is going
to give you nothing in speed. On the other hand it probably won't slow it down
either. I think it is simpler to implement and that is a big plus for me.

-S.



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