Author: Andreas Herrmann
Date: 07:51:37 01/06/04
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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 am working on one now and was curious. Mine is slowly starting to develop. I >like to research to gather some intel before trying an approach. I have decided >to use bitboards now that I understand them better and at least have those >created and the Winboard communication protocols sections covered. My next step >is bitwise operations, target selection, along with a lot of other things like >updating bitboards, time management, and the list goes on... > >In the midst of this the question arises as to how to make the engine more of a >positional player as opposed to an opportunistic piece grabber. > >On a more technical side, regarding 64 bit integers, how are those handled by a >32 bit hardware development platform running on a 32 bit OS? (P4/VC6/Win98se) It >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. > >-matt Hi Matt, i'm now working on my chess program since 1998. Ok with several bigger pauses from a halv until 2 years. The most time i have spend here in testing. The source coding takes only a very small time (perhaps 1 to 3%) from the totally spend time. And only a very few changes has made the program signicantly stronger, often or better most times new ideas, i have tryd, has been resulted in a worse playing strength. In the last years i have learnd a lot about chess programming, but there is also a lot which i have never tryd so far. Currently my source is very unreadable and each code change is very tricky. So i plan to rewrite my chess engine, after the IPCCC in February, totally from the scratch. My next chess engine will be devoloped object oriented. Well OOP is perhaps a bit slower, but therefore much more readable and changeable. And i plan to make the board presentation with bitboards instead of an integer array. I think most fun will be to write the move generator based on bitboards. And i think a lot of things in the eval can be done faster with bitboards, especially pawn structure things. From time to time, chess programming is very depressing, when changes on the engine brings not the expected results. So there is often a moment, where i would better quitting the chess programming. But all in all chess programming is a drug, and you will always come back to it. Andreas
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