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Subject: Re: Using BSF/BSR and bitboard rays only for sliding pieces

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 11:34:28 02/01/02

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On February 01, 2002 at 11:42:05, Alvaro Jose Povoa Cardoso wrote:

Hi :)

>In my checkers (portuguese/spanish version with long jumps) program I use the
>four bitboard ray technique for the four directions for each of the 32 square
>for the king jumps (with 32bit bitboards).

Could tell a bit more about this ray technique?
Preferably every single detail :)

>And then I use the BSF/BSR assembler instructions for finding the moves.
>Since the PC processor speed is evolving much faster than the memory/FSB speed I
>would like ask if there is a significant performance diference between this
>technique and the rotated bitboards with 'large' tables for chess.
>I did not started yet my chess engine, but I want to start with bitboards so I
>would like your opinions if this technique is fast enough for the sliding
>pieces.
>It seams to me that there is less data needed for these operations and
>consequentely all this will be on L1 cache most of the time.
>I also understand this technique better than rotated bitboards.

I tried a few days ago a different technique with reversed bitboards.
It used very small tables and it could do about 17 million bishop attack boards
per second. I counted the number of 64 bit operations needed in the rutine, and
found that one 64-bit operation took an average of 3.3 clock cycles (I ignored
all '=' which may is also count as 64-bit operations?). I think 3.3 clock cycles
is pretty good, I think it must be running entirely in L1 cache like yours.
I have not tested rotated, so I can't compare.

Unfortunately reversed boards has one major drawback, they split every attack
board into two boards, which spells trouble later on.
I devised a scheme to quickly reverse the board back, but I need to do two
bitscans and two more 64-bit operations. The slowdown will probably be too much
to be worth while.


>Best regards,
>Alvaro Cardoso

Cheers,
Sune.



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