Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: fast count function for bitboards

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 13:39:53 09/22/02

Go up one level in this thread


On September 22, 2002 at 11:09:56, scott farrell wrote:

>I have a board.Count method in my Java code, and it seems excessively slow. So
>much so I had to mostly exclude it from my evaluate function.
>
>I am coding in java I know, but I dont have any idea how this code even works (I
>borrowed it from deja a few months back - it was faster than a loop of 0 to 63).
>
>I found it was slow even counting a few bits that were on, say for counting the
>number of squares a bishop could move to.
>
>Can someone give me an opinion if these is reasonable code. Or is any sort of
>counting in bitboard is fately slow.
>
>Thanx
>Scott
>
>Here is the code:
>
>static final long ONES = 0x5555555555555555L;
> static final long TWOS = 0x3333333333333333L;
> static final int FOURS = 0x0f0f0f0f;
>
>public static final int count(long set) {
>  set = (set & ONES) + ((set >>> 1) & ONES);
>  set = (set & TWOS) + ((set >>> 2) & TWOS);
>  int result = (int) (set & 0xffffffff) + (int) (set >>> 32);
>  result = (result & FOURS) + ((result >>> 4) & FOURS);
>  return (result * 0x01010101) >>> 24;
> }


A couple of things.  The C programs use assembly code (BSF/BSR) to do this
very efficiently.  Java is going to make that difficult.. :)

Do you expect a lot of 1 bits or just a few?  If just a few, then a simple
loop with a & (a-1) repeated can be very fast..  If a lot, perhaps a table-
lookup will be faster in Java...



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.