Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 20:48:36 04/09/04
Go up one level in this thread
On April 09, 2004 at 16:51:34, Anthony Cozzie wrote: >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 Absolutely, and I think that computing attack tables at every node is inefficient, and I do not do it. Some say bitboards can do that quickly, but I have not use for it. Not sure if you have read my post correctly (or maybe I did a mistake?). Christophe
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