Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:07:25 06/13/02
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On June 13, 2002 at 14:45:06, stuart taylor wrote: [snip] >That's great! I didn't realize it was you. >I wish you great success, and I'm sure you might eventually become no.1 on >ssdf! (but don't waste too much time over it).] I think Uri has taken a very wise approach. He spent a great deal of time optimizing a move generator. This is the heart of a chess program. A program that has everything else excellent, but an average move generator can become strong but not a superstar, because it will become a bottleneck at some point. Once you have a vast framework in place, it becomes more difficult to change the powerplant that sits underneath. If you have chosen objects and encapsulate everything well, it becomes less difficult, but you would have to be very clever to have no rippling effects to doing major surgery on your move generator. It is pretty hard to write a capture function (for instance) that does not have intimate knowledge of the move generator. As an interesting exercise, try to imagine a capture function that can operate identically without knowing whether the board is in 0x88 or in bitboard format. But a move generator is one of the necessary (but not sufficient) techniques on the way to a great chess program. It must also be tactically excellent. It must be relatively bug free (probably one of the hardest to achieve). It will have to have an excellent search method (either pvs, mtd(f), or something equal to it undiscovered). It will need some innovations and some positional understanding. However, I think Uri's approach is a very sound one. Start with a solid foundation and build upon that. Take incremental steps towards a goal. Since he is also an excellent chess player, I expect that he can insert special knowledge into his program and know when it is doing something awful (not always as easy as it sounds for us patzers).
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