Author: KarinsDad
Date: 10:53:52 01/13/99
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On January 13, 1999 at 10:53:54, James Robertson wrote: >On January 12, 1999 at 23:48:46, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >> >>A couple of things. Until we get full 64 bit architectures (or until we run >>on Digital alphas, MIPS R10000's and HP PA8000's) on PC machines, bitboards are >>at the very best, a break-even proposition. > >What!? All that work to only program a break-even proposition?? > I cannot tell for sure, but I think (from my non-expert point of view) that break-even should not be the case. I'll relate a story from my college days. We had a programming course where the assignment was to find the shortest number of moves between two positions of a board game in under 60 seconds of mainframe CPU time (I do not even want to mention how many years ago that was). We had a month to finish the assignment and I wrote a fairly sophisticated program with hash tables and BitBoards. When I was finished, it took 2.5 seconds of CPU time for my program to run. The professor of the course had been using this assignment for over 5 years. It took his program 4.5 seconds of CPU time to run (the next best in the class was about 10 seconds and the student was using more conventional datastructures) and the professor was somewhat annoyed that a student had created a program in a month that was nearly twice as fast as what he had been working on for years (and he had the advantage of examining the code from many students). I asked him to show me his program and he ran it for me. I then asked him why he didn't use the compiler as opposed to the interpreter to run his program. When compiled, his program then took 1.5 seconds to run. The morals of the story are: (for him) Not even professors have all of the answers and (for me) No matter how good you are, there is always someone out there who is better and more experienced. From my point of view, there are definitive advantages and disadvantages to using BitBoards. The advantages appear to lie in the area of speed (granted, Robert knows more about this than I do), the disadvantages appear to lie in the area of difficulty (initially) of coding. In the long run, the advantages should outweigh the disadvantages. IMHO :) KarinsDad
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