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Subject: Re: null move and mate threat

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 07:02:13 10/09/04

Go up one level in this thread


On October 09, 2004 at 09:58:38, Gerd Isenberg wrote:

>On October 08, 2004 at 20:03:43, Zach Wegner wrote:
>
>>I don't know how to get WAC 141 in one second, but I know some things in your
>>code to improve it. First, you should not dynamically allocate storage for moves
>>(do not declare the array in search()), but rather have a large array of size
>>MAXMOVES * MAXPLY (it can probably be less) that is indexed by a pointer array
>>indexed by ply.
>
>I prefere your approach too, one huge move array and keeping index or pointer
>per ply, but don't confuse Stuart's local move array on the stack with
>dynamically allocated storage, which is usually got with alloc/malloc or
>operator new[] and freed with operator delete[] in C++.
>
>Keeping things on the stack frame is only about sub esp,LOCAL_SIZE.
>That's not that bad - at least there are no allocation/freeing costs.
>
>Gerd
>
>
>>If this seems confusing, heres some pseudo-code:
>>
>>mv movestack[MAXMOVES * MAXPLY];
>>mv *firstmove[MAXPLY];
>>...
>>firstmove[ply + 1] = gen(firstmove[ply]);
>>
>>This requires your gen() to return a pointer to the element after the last move
>>used, which shouldn't be too difficult.
>>
>>Second, it seems you are not using fractional extensions the way most people do.
>>The depth parameter is measured in some constant > 1 that is proportional to a
>>ply. I suppose floats could be used, but is important that the depth parameter
>>is not an int with 1 equal to a ply. The idea is that for some extensions you do
>>not want to extend a whole ply for just one occurence, but add a little bit of a
>>ply to the depth that could help trigger an extension later. As an example, at
>>ply X you have a condition met and you want to extend a half of a ply. Then at
>>ply X + 2(say) you have the same (or other) condition met, and you extend a half
>>of a ply again. The net extension is then just one ply, while in your
>>implementation it would not be extended because the half ply would be rounded
>>off at each ply. Or maybe I just misunderstood your code...
>>
>>Regards,
>>Zach

Okay if I hear you right, I can get rid of memory allocation and deallocation
calls by maintaining my own move stack. How much is that really worth?



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