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Subject: Re: How long to build your chess engine

Author: Matt Thomas

Date: 01:24:24 01/06/04

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On January 06, 2004 at 03:50:27, Albert Bertilsson wrote:

>On January 06, 2004 at 03:09:57, Matt Thomas wrote:
>
>>This question is for those who have designed and built their own chess engine.
>>How long did it take you?
>>
>I built my first playing chess engine (#Chess) in a month, but it played very
>poorly. After that I've upgraded it a lot, and then I started on a new engine.
>Building a chess engine takes lots of time, but it is also great fun!
>
>1. Don't let initial poor results let you down.
>2. Keep things simple.
>3. Implement some ways to catch bugs (removing bugs really improves the engine).
>
>/Regards Albert

Glad to hear it does take a while.  I am noticing there are a lot of things to
tie together so this will take some time.  I am trying to plan ahead to
hopefully keep the bugs at bay.  :)  I know from very past experiences that
allocating proper data sizes goes a long way. Nothing like overunning an array
boundary, hehe.

This probably goes against item 2 from above:  Did you use bitboards?  I decided
to try them out since they look to offer some advantages in locating attacked
pieces quickly.  The worst part was creating them.  My next step is bitwise math
to get the attack targets - this should be fun.  Its been a while since I did
anything major with C++ and it feels good to get back into it again.

I just hope when I put it all together that it doesn't try to play a game of
checkers!  -matt



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