Author: Don Dailey
Date: 08:42:45 07/15/98
Go up one level in this thread
On July 15, 1998 at 08:21:50, frank phillips wrote:
>Thanks to those who responded. There are some interesting pointers and most of
>all encouragement. Tom asked about node-rate. I will do the test he suggested
>of how many nodes it takes to a reach a ply. The current node rate is around
>40k nps in the starting position, rising to up to 70k nps or so in the endgame:
>where a node is a call to the quiescent search function or a call to Negamax
>that is not also a call to Quiescent (ie nodes are counted in Negamax only after
>the if(depth>=maxdepth) Quiescent(....); bit).
>
>Don indicated that there are no big leaps just lots of small improvements that
>add up. This is useful to know. I obviously have an awful lot of small steps
>to take. At the moment I bring a local array of structures into existence at
>each incarnation of the search functions. It is of fixed size - int MoveT
>move[MAX] - which is gross and may be slowing things down. I will move to a
>global stack array and pointers next. You guys seem to have been born
>genetically imprinted with the null move, killer heuristic, hash table,
>bitboards etc concepts :-) As a complete beginner I have found it difficult
>to get hold of material describing these techniques and was looking for
>references.- is there a relevant FAQ somewhere? There are few books on computer
>chess and those mentioned here seem to be out of print. Perhaps the answer is
>back issues of the ICCA journal - but hopefully not them all. (Are they
>suitable for only the experienced expert?) . Without the net and the help of
>members of CCC I would not have even taken my first step.
>
>Frank
Believe it or not, I think most of the information you need is on this
newsgroup in previous posts. Just recently we had a round of discussion
about the killer moves. Everything in computer chess is easy to
understand, it's just a matter of learning the terminology and
understanding a few concepts. Since you've worked your way through
alpha beta prunning I don't believe you will have a problem.
Do you understand hash theory? You will need a little background on
this to get a working transposition table implementation. You said
until recently you were not a programmer so you will have some catching
up to do, so it wouldn't surprise me if you didn't know hash theory.
This may be one of the more advanced concepts for you to understand
but even this is not really difficult. There are general books
available on computer algorithms and any good one will include a
chapter on hashing techniques which should be adequate for you.
Again, on this group a few weeks back there was a bunch of posts
on how to generate a hash key. I would download all the posts and
carefull weed out all the junk and try to get to these.
I started the same way you are. With a high school education I just
went out and bought a TRS-80 from radio shack, read the manual
and just started programming. But I also read everything I could
get my hands on. In those days they had great magazines that had
digestable information on algorithms and techniques for newbies like
I was. But today, very few computer owners know anything about
computers so the magazines are really just for advertisements.
But you can still get what you need from books.
- Don
P.S. Keep asking questions. There are several on this newsgroup
willing to answer them.
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