Author: James Robertson
Date: 12:10:49 01/13/99
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On January 13, 1999 at 13:53:52, KarinsDad wrote: >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. I hope so. I lost years of my life making workable bitboards. > >IMHO :) I keep seeing IMHO. What does it stand for? > >KarinsDad
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