Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 11:17:48 12/31/03
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On December 31, 2003 at 08:24:55, Ed Trice wrote: >At that point in time I had a crude bitboard move generator in place for Gothic >Chess. It was not hooked up to an alpha-beta procedure, nor any type of >evaluation function. Even with these caveats in place, the individual persisted >in asking me performance-related questions. > >The only way I could test the engine was to call the move generator in a for >loop and time it. Again, this would be like detaching Crafty from the rest of >its engine, then seeing how quickly it could generate moves. > >My numbers were of the order of magnitude you mentioned, but I do not have the >exact figures. The problem here is that you can test that exact same thing in Crafty (and other programs), and they don't come anywhere close to your numbers. Crafty generates 22 million moves per second on my Athlon 2GHz, while you generate 140 million per second on a PIII 2GHz (which I've never heard of, but whatever). Even Yace (an array based program, AFAIK) gets *only* 46 million moves per second on my machine. Your numbers even blow away Crafty's numbers from a quad Opteron, which generates 38 million moves per second. Since you are using 80-bit bitboards, your numbers should be slower than Crafty using 64-bit bitboards, and certainly slower than an array based move generator. Something doesn't add up. That seems to be very common with things you write. You seem to be mainly interested in self promotion and appearing to know what you're talking about regardless of what is fact and what is fiction. Take your webpage here for example: http://www.gothicchess.org/gothic_vortex.html You write: "On the minus side, an Array Move Generator is many times slower than a Bitboard Move Generator. A recent experiment showed that the Bitboard Move Generator in the Gothic Vortex program is about 30 times as fast as the Array Move Generator found in the Zillions-Of-Games engine." I'm pretty sure every experienced computer chess programmer would disagree that array based move generators are many times slower than a bitboard move generator, especially on 32-bit hardware. You frequently compare your program with Zillions of Games, and then declare your program to be a monster because it beats it 3-0, or runs 30 times faster, or whatever. This is nothing but a straw man. Zillions of Games is not optimized for any game. It is a general game playing program that will play any game that you "teach" it to play. We could all make wild claims if we found the slowest program on earth and made all of our claims based upon a comparison between the two. So like I said, something doesn't add up. Either you're making up numbers, or you have some secret that is allowing you to blow away every other PC program on earth, or there is something else you're leaving out.
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