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Subject: Re: Strength question

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 23:19:13 01/05/03

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On January 06, 2003 at 02:02:34, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>On January 05, 2003 at 23:21:40, Russell Reagan wrote:
>
>>It's probably best not to, since it is a linear improvement to an exponential
>>problem. Where the real improvements in playing strength will come from are
>>exponential improvements to the exponential problem (like null-move knocking
>>that branching factor down). Of course, I'm sure you already know this, and this
>>is your clever way of making others think about it for themselves and discover
>>the answer on their own, giving us all a greater sense of accomplishment and
>>self worth (not to mention saving us a great deal of time) ;-)
>
>Yes, I agree with this.  The real improvement comes in doing new stuff, not in
>making the old stuff a few percent faster.
>
>Which is why I brought this up.  If I could decrease bf by a few percent I'd get
>more speedup than I would by performance twiddling for years.
>
>bruce

In my case I found that thinking about new stuff gave me idea to improve the
speed of Movei.

I thought about implementing one of Ed's ideas and I found that changing my move
generator to find the biggest capture take too much time inspite of the fact
that movei generate the list of the legal moves
before making a move because I like to have the ability to use information about
that number for extension and pruning decisions.

I decided to have special function of generating moves for non captures and
captures and it made my move generator faster.
I continued with adding special function for generating white pawn moves and
black pawn moves and even the function of white pawns I divided to generate pawn
move one square,generating pawn move two squares...

I believe that it may be possible to improve the speed of all part of the
program by a factor that is bigger than 2 but new data structure is needed and
it is not simple to do it.

I believe that all programs do too much the same thing again and again.
One example is that programs usually do not use the list of the moves 2 plies
earlier for generating moves and I believe that a big gain can be earned from
doing it but it is not simple to do it with no bugs so I even did not try to do
it.

Uri



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