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Subject: Re: Programmer challenge

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:26:18 02/20/03

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On February 20, 2003 at 03:16:58, Ed Schröder wrote:

One point.  After you try a few such moves, you can become pretty well convinced
that this is an ALL node where move ordering is irrelevant.  You ought to turn
it off
after N moves have not produced a cutoff.  N is something you have to come up
with
of course.  I do this with the History heuristic and I use N=4 myself, as I have
already tried
the hash move, good captures (SEE says gain >= 0) and killer moves.




>Taken from my web-page:
>
>Contrary to most chess programs, when going one ply deeper in the chess tree
>REBEL generates all moves for the given (and new) ply. During move generation
>REBEL quickly evaluates each move generated by using the piece-square technique,
>this evaluation is only used for move ordering later, it is certainly not for
>evaluating the position.
>
>The advantage of this time consuming process is that it pays off later when move
>ordering becomes an issue, this provided you have created 12 reasonable
>organized piece-square tables for the move generator. REBEL's data structure for
>move generation looks as follows:
>
>static char move_from  [5000];
>static char move_to    [5000];
>static char move_value [5000];
>
>So when adding a new generated move to "move_from" and "move_to" REBEL also will
>fill "move_value" via the corresponding piece-square table using the formula:
>
>move_value = table[move_to] - table[move_from];
>
>
>http://members.home.nl/matador/chess840.htm
>
>==============
>
>Data structure of "move_value" :
>
>255   : end of move list.
>1-254 : move_value = table[move_to] - table[move_from];
>0     : move already searched.
>
>Now whenever the Search needs a (new) move a routine is called that gets the
>(next) highest move from the move list and then this move is marked (zeroed) as
>being searched.
>
>This is a costly operation, during the years this is the best (fastest) code I
>was able to produce. The question is if there are better (faster) methods to get
>the highest value from an unsorted table.
>
>The main loop:
>
>        value=1;                 // work variable
>        x=....                   // pointer to move list table
>        y=-1;                    // pointer to highest value
>
>loop:   x++; if (move_value[x] <= value) goto loop;
>        if (move_value[x] == 255) return y;
>        value=move_value[x];
>        y=x;
>        goto loop;
>
>-> "y" is the highest move from the table.
>
>===================
>
>in ASM I have this:
>
>        mov     BL,1		   // work variable
>	mov	EDX,...            // pointer to move list table
>	mov	ESI,-1             // pointer to highest value
>
>loop:   mov     CL,move_value[EDX] // CL = move_value[x]
>        inc     EDX                // x++
>
>        cmp     CL,BL              // if (move_value[x] <= value)
>        jbe     loop
>
>        cmp     CL,0FFh            // if (move_value[x]==255)
>        je      done
>
>        mov     BL,CL              // value=move_value[x]
>        mov     ESI,EDX            // y=x
>
>        jmp     loop
>
>
>==============
>
>Any faster methods?
>
>Ed



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