Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 16:28:10 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 With exception of ruffian all commercial programs are non bitboards. Bitboards are good to quickly make a program, because there are well optimized solutions like Crafty. When you want to go get stronger then you will suffer maintenance problems and lack datastructures to improve your program. Nowadays we have very fast L1 caches at processors as well as L2 caches, so the interesting idea of a datastructure that could fit in just the registers is no longer needed. The advantage of bitboards, needing little registers (assuming 64 bits registers) to represent something very simple then gets annihilated by the need for extra knowledge needed to combine. So more powerful datastructures are needed if you are interested in adding chessknowledge such as extensive mobility and attacks. Which by the way all commercial programs have. Not necessarily in evaluation though. That i use everything in evaluation from DIEP doesn't mean others also do it.
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