Author: Steve Maughan
Date: 16:04:04 06/27/03
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Sune, >Perft is no good speed indicator anyway, not even for a move gen. >The perft tree is so different from the chess tree. > >Optimizing for perft is basicly like building a formula 1 car to use for >off-road rally. I don't agree. Perft is *quite* a good thing to optimize. There are really four fundamental foundations of a good chess program - 1) Evaluation 2) Move Ordering 3) Make / Unmake moves 4) Generate Moves There are of course other elements (e.g. extension) but these four elements IMO are the key elements. Perft directly measures the performance of the last two elements. Some would say that the speed of move generation is not that important and this is true to a certain extent since time spent in the GenMove routine is often less than 10%. However, if you can generate moves quickly you will most likely also be able to generate mobility quickly - an element of the evaluation function. So I would argue that perft goes some way to measuring three out of the four factors I've listed. It's other advantage is that you can't cheat with perft - i.e. for any given position there is a certain number of nodes that represent perft 5. This is in contrast to Node Per Second where it's not clear what constitutes a node. So you can see and objectively measure your perft times against other engines. Regards, Steve
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