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Subject: Re: Mixing 0x88 and bitboards

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 16:56:26 06/25/02

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On June 25, 2002 at 17:33:07, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

>On June 25, 2002 at 17:28:10, Russell Reagan wrote:
>
>>And as for the original testing if there is a pawn on E6, don't you keep a
>>64-square array anyway along with your bitboards?
>
>IMHO That's not really bitboards any more.

I do this because it is faster on 32 bit machines than hunting thru the
various bitmaps to find what is on square E6, for example.  It would be
possible to change my move format and my move generator so that the captured
piece is not included.  Then this 64 word array could be discarded.  And one
day, for speed, that will happen.  But at the moment, with all the fiddling
around I do, the redundant data is very useful in that I have a debug mode
that validates everything and if the bitmaps and the 64 char array don't
agree, it pukes and tells me about it.

>
>>If so, is there anything that
>>a classical approach can do more efficiently than a bitboard approach? Edge
>>detection and attack detection seem to be two of 0x88's typical strong points,
>>but I don't see how they would be faster than bitboards. Or is this a matter of
>>the hardware you use? Ex. 32-bit hardware, it might be close...64-bit hardware,
>>bitboards faster for everything...?
>
>Generating non-capturing moves.
>
>--
>GCP

Maybe...  I would expect that to be a break-even operation.  But since
captures are generated first at every ply in the tree, and often that is
enough to stop the search with a fail high, or in the q-search captures are
the only thing generated most of the time.  So the GenerateCaptures() option
is hit a lot more frequently...

IE in a current profile run for Crafty, GenerateCaputures() was called
1.3M times, GenerateMoves() was called .4M times... a 3:1 ratio.  This
seems to hold up across several different sets of positions I tried in
fact...  3:1 to 4:1 was typical...



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