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Subject: Re: Representations

Author: Walter Faxon

Date: 13:16:22 12/22/05

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On December 22, 2005 at 16:03:18, Stuart Cracraft wrote:

>On December 21, 2005 at 10:49:43, Joshua Shriver wrote:
>
>>Look into 0x88:
>>
>>http://www.cis.uab.edu/info/faculty/hyatt/boardrep.html
>>
>>On December 21, 2005 at 09:04:17, David Rasmussen wrote:
>>
>>>I am most familiar with bitboards, but now I have to make a chess program with
>>>an old C compiler (gcc 2.6.0) that doesn't support "long long". I could typedef
>>>a struct with two 32-bit ints to be a bitboard and then implement the logical
>>>operators in functions, but I want to consider other options.
>>>
>>>What would be a good representation for a "competitive" chess program (not a toy
>>>project), on a platform with little memory and slow performance (C is compiled
>>>into a interpreted language in this case).
>>>
>>>/David
>
>
>Personally I always feel guilty thinking or doing anything other than
>bitboard, at least as a goal, if not reality.
>
>The reason is that 64-bit chips and 64-bit OS ultimately being common
>are the reason to make your program future-oriented.
>
>Bitboards, for example, as implemented by Crafty or GNU Chess 5, are really
>artistic. Knowledge representation is very elegant. Crafty is immensely
>stronger. I am not comparing that.
>
>They make encoding knowledge more-straightforward.
>
>I would advocate bitboard for everybody. Make your program 0x88 or
>non-bitboard for moves and use bitboards for evaluation and then
>rewrite your move generator in the future. You don't have to go bitboard
>for everything at once.
>
>This way your learning curve isn't as steep so suddenly.
>
>Stuart


Hi, Stuart.

My understanding is that GNU chess v5 has a reputation of being weaker than v4.
Is this true and if so is it just a matter of v4 having been tuned better?
What's the status of GNU chess?  Are you working or planning to work on it?
Lots of ideas from other open-source engines are available now, esp.
GNU-licensed Fruit and co.

-Walter



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