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Subject: Re: The need to unmake move

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 10:36:59 08/20/03

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On August 20, 2003 at 13:05:17, Christophe Theron wrote:
>>Copying a struct does take time, and it can easily be pinpointed. Saving and
>>restoring and unupdating also takes time, but is harder to identify. Especially
>>since the stress on code cache and branch prediction don't show up in a run time
>>profile.
>>
>>... Johan
>
>
>
>I'm not surprised by Bob results on this issue, as Crafty has a *lot* of things
>to save/restore, and all of them are rather big structures.
>
>In a non-bitboard program like Chess Tiger, saving/restoring is probably faster.
>At least it is in Chess Tiger.
>
>I do not know if you are using bitboards in The King. Do you?
>
>Actually I'm using a mix of undo and restore: I do not save the chessboard
>itself because undoing a move involves very few read/write operations. So I undo
>the move "manually" on the chessboard but restore with a memcpy a single
>structure that holds the rest of the chessboard and a part of the search state.
>I seem to remember that this structure is less than 40 bytes big, so restoring
>it is really no problem, and as you pointed out most of the time the data to be
>restored still lies in the L1 cache.
>
>In any case I cannot imagine that restoring the hash key for the current
>position from memory could be slower than computing it again by undoing a
>sequence of XORs (at least 2) on a 64 bits integer...

Actually I think you are doing the same as Crafty, Crafty is using a mix of
copying and undoing as well.
The expensive stuff, hash key and rotated boards are copied back.
The piece bitboards don't all need accessing, perhaps just 1 or 2 out of ~20, so
for this undoing is faster.

-S.
>    Christophe



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