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Subject: How Many Clock Cycles to Generate One Legal Move?

Author: Bob Durrett

Date: 19:00:27 11/16/02



I was thinking it might be *fun* to create a machine which does nothing more
than create legal move sequences from some preset legal chess position.  These
sequences might be dumped into a large part of RAM for later copy to a hard disk
or printout.

The key idea I'm toying with is to represent a chess position by a listing of
legal moves.  Whenever a new move is made [by the person (or thing) playing
against the machine, or by the machine if it's playing against itself,] then the
machine would do nothing more than modify that listing (plus copy the move
representation to a temporary storage place in RAM). The new listing of legal
moves would then represent the new position.  The key idea is to represent a
position by a listing of legal moves.  When a move is made, there is a "from"
square and a "to" square.  Only consequences of changes made on these two
squares would have to be considered to modify the legal move list.

Then, to make it more interesting, a really fast random number generator would
be used to select one of the resulting legal moves.  If the machine were playing
against itself, the sequences of moves should be generated very quickly.  How
quickly?

In the beginning, I am only interested in the time it would take to modify that
listing.  The machine could play both sides, removing the need for
time-consuming input/output.  After generating a legal move sequence ending in
mate, it would then start working on the next legal move sequence.  After a
million or so moves were made, then the time required could be divided by the
number of moves.  That resulting time per move that I'm asking about.  Rather
than worry about the fact that some computers are faster than others, maybe the
best bet would be to express it as number of clock cycles per move.  A modern
high-end processor should be assumed.

Each sequence would be what two "really dumb" chessplayers would produce if they
knew how to produce legal moves but knew NOTHING at all else about chess.

P.S.  Is there a better way?

Bob D.




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