Author: Matt Thomas
Date: 02:31:07 01/07/04
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On January 06, 2004 at 10:51:37, Andreas Herrmann wrote: >On January 06, 2004 at 03:09:57, Matt Thomas wrote: <snipped myself - ow> > >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 I had thoughts about using OOP, but the thought of all the extra overhead in typing really didn't appeal to me. It does offer an adavantage of organizing data that has common usage. I decided to comprimise and just use the occasional structure when the need to group data arose. My problem with OOP is that I turn into a fanatical OOP to the max programmer and spend too much time on planning a perfect programming world if you know what i mean. Still, I don't know, I kind of miss all my classes and various data cloaking schemes. Bitboards are really cool! They seem like a nice way to quickly spot pieces that are prime for capture, which can be used to review both sides of course to show threats and weaknesses. I am no expert in them, but what I understand so far has me enthused. -matt
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