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Subject: Approaches to threading

Author: Eric Oldre

Date: 14:24:59 06/15/04



First off, I've taken everyone's advice from last week and changed my engine so
that most functions take a pointer to a board object as a parameter instead of
operating on a global board.

I now have it doing a basic alpha-beta search with QSearch, a basic evaluation,
and MMV/LVA move ordering. It is also returning and printing out the PV.

At this point (having hardly anything tuned) it's already as fast as my old
engine in vb.net. Although as I improve the evaluation it will slow down of
course.

My next step is to get it implementing the winboard protocol, perhaps UCI as
well. I've decided to take a approach where i have the main thread read commands
from winboard, and a separate "thinker" thread work on the problem. similar in
concept to what i saw in the Gerbil source.

Since this is the first program I've written in C. I don't have much experience
with multi-threading in C. I've started to create something using the
CreateThread and ExitThread calls in <windows.h>. I was wondering if people felt
that was a good idea, or if I'd be better off trying to learn about POSIX
threading.

Is there a 3rd approach to look at?

Is there a performance advantage to either?

Does one have a much easier learning curve than the other? What i've done so far
with the <windows.h> stuff hasn't seemed to difficult to grasp, but I'm not
terribly far along yet.

Thanks,
Eric Oldre



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