Author: Eric Oldre
Date: 13:26:01 06/10/04
I've decided to stop development on the vb.net version of my engine (Murderhole) in order to focus on a new version written in C that has a chance to be competitive eventually. (eventually=hopefully in my lifetime) Considering that a large chuck of the code I’ve ever written in C has had the words "Hello" and "World" in it, this could end up being quite a process for me. However I feel pretty good since after a few nights I now have methods for fenset, fenget, move_make, reset_board, as well as functions to get ranks from positions etc. In the VB.net version of my engine I ended up having 1 global board, And I’ve began to program my new engine the same way. Reading the Crafty source, I see that Mr. Hyatt is passing around pointers to some object that (among other things) has a board position type struct. (I’m not sure of the details, don't have the source in front of me). I'm guessing that he needs to pass this tree around to so that crafty can take advantage of multiple processors. I.e., each thread is going to need its own version of the board to pass around. My questions are: 1) Am I right that the pointers to the board are used so that crafty can use multiple processors? Would there be a way to use multiple processors without this technique or something similar? 2) What other advantages would there be to passing the pointers to the tree? (if any). It would seem to me to cause some performance hit on single processors. 3) What other advice or experience would other authors like to give me concerning this architecture decision? 4) So far I've been studying the source to crafty, tscp, and gerbil. Anyone have examples of other engines that I could study to get a handle on some of the different techniques used? Thanks, Eric Oldre http://www.oldre.com/Murderhole PS... I'm not going to be at home tonight, so i may not be able to respond to any answers right away.
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