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Subject: Re: Strength question

Author: Miguel A. Ballicora

Date: 22:05:55 01/05/03

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On January 05, 2003 at 22:50:18, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>On January 05, 2003 at 22:35:45, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote:
>
>>Wayne is right.
>>
>>It was not on target. Vincent mentioned something supporting why he does not
>>like bitboards. Big deal, he does not like them, so what? Russell's comment is
>>uncalld for, it is "ad hominem" and totally out of the blue. Well, not out of
>>the blue, out of "not so old" flame wars.
>>And not, the response IMHO is not reasonable. I am really sick and tired of
>>perpetual wars with little or no content. It makes it very difficult to follow
>>the interesting part of the threads!!. This has been going on for so long that a
>>member of CCC would have lots of trouble to distinguish who was first.
>>Please, guys, control yourself. There is no need to start all over again.
>>_Please_.
>
>Vincent answered my question, maybe.  I was talking about move generation and
>supporting stuff.
>
>I'd like mine to go faster, but realistically, what would happen if I made it
>faster?  Not a whole heck of a lot.
>
>Everyone who starts a chess program becomes an instant move generation fanatic,
>because that's what you do first.  There is a post here now (a fine post) about
>making the fastest possible popcount, which is used by move generation.
>
>I ask how much this matters.

Not much, I guess. I remember a sane advice you gave once: start with you move
generator, and do not worry about the speed. Wrote the whole program and see.
You are going to rewrite everything eventually.

However, it matters if you have fun with it. It all depends on your goals.

Interestingly, my numbers look very similar to yours (percentage of time used by
some functions). However, In my case it will make sense trying to make some
functions faster. Why? because everything is sloooow. I have the feeling that
that it is possible to speed it up 2x. Once that is done, other parts of the
program could also been speed it up 2x. How do I know this? well, many good
amateur programs are 2-4x faster. I use bitboards, but I better not say it
because it might be considered off topic in this thread and I will be accused of
being an inexperienced programmer, which is certainly true :-).

Anyway, I am not trying to make things faster, there are many other aspects that
will give to my program "gaviota" more strength and more entertainment to me.
But check the nps to make sure that I do no make it even slower.

Miguel


>bruce



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