Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 10:58:30 08/28/98
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On August 28, 1998 at 05:32:01, Pauli Misikangas wrote: >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 I would only remind you that the first bitboard program, chess 4.x, used 64 bit words, on a machine that only had 60 bit words (the old CDC machines) and yet they found them workable. The second program to use them was Kiassa from the former Soviet Union, and they used 32 bit machines for their program. So there's nothing inherently bad about an 81-bit bitmap for Shogi... Just break it up into 3 32bit words, or 2 64bit words and have at it...
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