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Subject: Re: Diary of a Chess Engine

Author: Dan Homan

Date: 11:20:26 09/10/98

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On September 10, 1998 at 13:58:42, John Stoneham wrote:

>I've wanted for some time to write a chess engine, and now I've finally got the
>courage (read: ignorance) to start.  I'm creating a work-in-progress journal,
>detailing all my thoughts and ideas while I'm actually writing the code, and I
>would love for everyone here to read it and tell me what you think.  Some of my
>choices in writing the engine may be just plain wrong, and if you think so, let
>me know! On the other hand, if I have some useful idea, I'd love to hear about
>that as well. I plan on posting updates to the journal every week or so, so keep
>checking my web page for the updates. Here is the URL for my web page:
>
>http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/4714/index.html
>
>If you take the time to read the journal, please take the time to tell me.

Hi John!

Just read your journal.  Very interesting.  It sounds like you have a pretty
good game plan going.  I just have one question about using classes for
moves and positions.  How do you plan to initialize them?  Will you create
them on-the-fly or will you create them all when the program starts up and use
them as necessary?

My program, EXchess, is also a C++ (mostly C) program and I use structures
for moves, positions, etc which are essentially equivalent to classes.  I
tested on-the-fly creation versus pre-creation at start-up and found that
on-the-fly creation slowed down the engine significantly (I don't remember
the figure).  The only down-side is that this eats up more memory because
I have these data structures always sitting in memory... but I figured that
memory was cheap. :)

 - Dan
>
>Thanks!
>
>John Stoneham
><jot@electrotex.com>



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