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Subject: Re: Storing a chess move

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 12:47:11 12/26/03

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On December 26, 2003 at 11:49:36, Anthony Cozzie wrote:

>IMO every chess engine should have white/black/allpawn bitboards.

Perhaps.  So far I have never found any use for it, but I am sure there are lots
of neat
tricks waiting to get discovered if/when I implement it.

>Whether rotated and piece bitboards give you more bang for the buck than attack tables
>is much more nebulous.  Attack tables are definitely better on 32 bit processors, but now
>that the Opteron is here . . .

This is where I apparently have a different mindset from most other programmers.
 Modern
processors are so fast that that you can do almost anything you want, your
engine will
still win easily against 99.99% of all chess players on the planet.  Even
Gothmog, a pathetically
slow and buggy non-bitboard engine,  has a blitz rating above 2700 on ICC
(running on a PIV 2.4
GHz).  It's possible that it could be a few points stronger if I converted it to
a bitboard engine and
run it on an Opteron, but who cares?  The difference between a 2700 rated engine
and a 3000
rated engine (ICC ratings) is mostly academic, IMHO.  For similar reasons, I am
currently not very
interested in parallel search.

I consider it a much more interesting challenge to create something that plays
reasonably
well on slow handheld units with limited memory.  And I think we will have to
wait a few
years before we will see processors comparable to the Opteron in handheld
computers.

Tord



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