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Subject: Re: How long to build your chess engine

Author: Gerd Isenberg

Date: 06:42:31 01/06/04

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On January 06, 2004 at 08:12:57, Anthony Cozzie 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?
>
>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.

On x86-32 64-bit shift are two instructions only, 7 bytes opcode:

shld        edx,ecx,9
shl         ecx,9

shrd        ecx,edx,7
shr         edx,7


>  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



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