Author: Kip Werking
Date: 15:37:57 09/01/02
Hello - I am a newbie who just joined. I have three questions: 1. I am sure many people have thought of this before, but there must be faster ways to updating lists of legal moves, other than using brute force. Obviously, the program would not check every possible square, but only a list of pieces. My question is: would it be faster to set flags for each piece, and only update a piece's list of possible moves if one of the flags has been tripped? For example, if an h pawn moves, it seems almost silly to have to update the list of possible moves for a knight on the a column, and simply check to see whether or not the list of moves for the knight needs to be updated, and if not (as in this case), know that the list of moves has not changed. Do programs already do this? Or is this inefficient or even incoherent in some way that I do not realize? 2. I am writing a C++ library for playing chess. I am a complete C++ amateur (this is my first real OOD program) and I am sure that my program is inefficient in many ways. I am sure that someone must have already written an almost standard library that has optimum efficiency! Where could I find such a library, if only to compare with my own and learn from it? 3. It seems to me that static board evaluations' accuracy depends upon the "volatility" of the board. By this I mean that if the board: has few pieces the pieces protect each other strong pieces (king and queen) are not exposed Then the value returned by a static evaluation function (that did not consider volatility) would tend to return more accurate results than for boards that: have many pieces the pieces are not protected the pieces are exposed This is simply because there is more room for the value of a volatile board to change after the horizon (on the next move) than for a less volatile board. My question is: do programs already consider board volatility? Is this a worthwhile concept?
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