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Subject: Re: Chess Engine Performance Tests?

Author: Albert Bertilsson

Date: 07:35:46 08/11/03

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On August 10, 2003 at 21:03:18, Johan Wessfeldt wrote:

>jO!
>
>Im working on a chessengine in java and I'm pretty much done with my move
>generation algorithms.(Took awhile to complete.. :] )
>
>Are there any common tests ppl use to test their chess engines with to see how
>fast it is? (Not how smart it is)
>
>Like.. creating 1.000.000 move-lists out of preset chess position.
>Could be fun to see if my engine(or java) is good or not :]

Since you've asked for performance tests and several people have suggested
perft-test I'd just like to point out a very important thing:

Perft-test only gives you a CLUE on how fast your engine MIGHT be at actually
playing chess. A good example is my engine (Sharper) that does perft calculation
quite fast, but isn't fast when actually playing chess. I'm kinda stupid so it
took me a long time to realise why.

This is because when calculating perft your engine will build a very shallow and
wide tree. When you improve your engine it will (hopefully) build very deep and
narrow tree. When playing chess you'll need to other stuff (like evaluating the
board, update hash-keys), so you might add lots of datastructures that makes you
engine slower when doing perft, but lots faster when playing because your
evaluation becomes faster.

Use perft mainly to build a stable and correct engine. For any speed testing I'd
seriously recomend that benchmark in another way, doing real searching.

Regards Albert



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