Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto
Date: 13:38:49 04/10/02
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On April 10, 2002 at 00:27:54, Keith Evans wrote: >When Hsu designed the move generator for Deep Blue he added extra hardware so >that he could generate checking (even discovered checks) and check evasion moves >more quickly than his first move generator could. (Compare the diagrams for the >square transmitters and receivers in the IEEE micro article to those in his >thesis and to those describing the Belle generator.) He could have generated >these moves without the extra hardware and design time by iterating through >moves and throwing away moves which didn't meet the criteria, but apparently he >thought that the performance of the move generator was important enough in these >cases to justify adding the complexity. > >What's the general opinion on this? Was this time well spent, or was it a waste >of time? I searched for information on what programs typically do during qsearch >and couldn't find much of anything directly related. It seems like he would have >simulated this before commiting to design, and perhaps discussed it publicly >with some top programmers. In the qsearch, being able to generate only capture moves fast is a nice speed advantage. If you want to do checks/check evasions too, you'll have to generate these moves somehow. If you have to fall back to your standard movegen, that'll come with a speed loss, so it makes sense to try to avoid that. Since qsearch tends to amount to a large % of the nodes searched, this sounds like an understandable decision. Note that there are usually a lot less captures+checks/evasions than normal moves. -- GCP
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