Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: How long to build your chess engine

Author: Anthony Cozzie

Date: 05:12:57 01/06/04

Go up one level in this thread


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?

It takes years.  I started working on Zappa almost 3 years ago; it is still far
from competitive with crafty / yace, let alone the commercial programs.  It also
depends on how much stuff you copy from Crafty/Gerbil/TSCP.

>seemed to me that they would be handled with twice the amount of instruction
>cycles because there are only 32 bit registers and each 64 bit value would
>likely be broken into two 32 bit values for math operations.  So the appearance
>of a single-pass 64 bit math operation really is handled as two 32 bit values
>would be handled.  ...unless I am missing something.
>
>I ask because I had seen a 64 bit integer value being used in some code and
>thought it was not really giving a speed gain on 32 bit hardware.

It isn't.  Bitboards are slower than attack tables on 32 bit hardware.  For
example, a 64 bit shift on 32 bit hardware is something like 10 instructions and
includes a conditional branch.  I _think_ they are faster on 64 bit hardware,
but there aren't really enough data points.  I have a dual opteron though, so
we'll be finding out soon :)

anthony



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.