Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 13:51:34 04/09/04
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On April 09, 2004 at 15:26:34, Christophe Theron wrote: >On April 09, 2004 at 14:27:48, Sune Fischer wrote: > >> >>>Clearly, nothing beats the ugliness of bitboards. >> >>This may not be the best example to judge by. >> >>-S. >>> Christophe > > > >In the contrary, I think it's fairly typical of bitboard code. > >Elegance is supposed to be the strong point of bitboards. > >The only thing I find elegant is the pseudo-great starting idea "64 squares <-> >64 bits". > >Passed this point everything becomes unreadable and ugly. > >I also see it often used to pre-compute attack tables and such, which is in my >opinion contrary to one of the most important things I have learned in computer >chess: do not compute anything in advance if you are not certain that you will >use it. This is not an intrinsic problem of bitboards, it's just that use of >bitboards often go along with this misuse of computing resources, is it just by >chance? > >Bitboards are a great tool allowing you to compute very complex things in a >blink. The problem is that in a chess program you rarely need to do these >complex computations if you know what you are doing, and so you end up with ugly >and unreadable code and waste of resources (in particular of L1 and L2 caches). > >That being said, I do not want to be too harsh: it is probably possible to write >a top-level chess program using bitboards, a program that would be not very far >behind the programs using more portable approaches like 0x88 and derivatives. > >Somebody will write one some day. > > > > Christophe (setting up a shield for the upcoming flame) Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't attack tables the exact opposite of your "do not compute anything in advance" strategy? anthony
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