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Subject: Bit boards in Shogi?

Author: Pauli Misikangas

Date: 02:32:01 08/28/98


Hi all!

Here is a question for chess programmers who use bit boards in their programs.
If you'd have to implement a Shogi program (Shogi is a chess-like game with 9x9
board, 40 pieces, and an interesting rule which allows you to drop a captured
piece back onto board as one of your own pieces), would you still use bit
boards, or prefer some other data structure?

I'm a Shogi programmer myself (author of 'Shocky'), and my data structure is
based on huge amount of pointers pointing from pieces to squares and vice versa.
I didn't even try bit boards, because I thought that they would not be so
efficient in Shogi, because of larger board. Do you agree? I think that chess
programmers are lucky, because a chess board happens to have exactly the same
number of squares that 64-bit integer has bits, and this allows to use extremely
efficient bit operations for board handling. Do you think that this is the main
reason for the efficiency of bit boards? Would there be major problems to handle
81 bits instead of 64?

Pauli Misikangas



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