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Subject: Re: How important are Bitboards?

Author: David Mitchell

Date: 12:13:49 02/29/04

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On February 29, 2004 at 14:44:54, Martin Schreiber wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I've two questions:
>
>1.)
>is using bitboards a necessary condition to write a strong chess engine? And if
>not so, what other good/fast solution we have for the board representation?
>
>2.)
>And are there strong freeware or commercial chess engines, which don't use
>bitboards?
>And what kind of board representation they use?
>
>Thanks for your comments
>Martin

1. No, bitboards are not necessary in order to write a strong chess engine.
2. I would guess 0x88 is as fast as bitboards for 64 bit cpu's, and slightly
faster than bitboards on 32 bit cpu's. Hard to make a direct comparison because
with bitboards, you get more info your program can use later in the eval, etc.

If you click on Computer Resource Center -> Chess links, and select Crafty, you
can find and d/l an excellent write up by Robert Hyatt on this subject.

Bitboards take a while to learn to use well. Many commercial programs have not
used them in the past, but may in the future if the 64 bit cpu's become quite
popular, because of the 2x (at least) speed up bitboards achieve on them.

dave



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