Author: Peter McKenzie
Date: 14:05:28 04/09/99
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On April 09, 1999 at 13:00:28, Christophe Theron wrote: >On April 09, 1999 at 00:48:35, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >> >>On April 08, 1999 at 23:06:11, Christophe Theron wrote: >> >>>This reminds me of a friend of mine (french he has now moved to Canada), who >>>wanted to write a chess program. He began with move generation, and wrote a >>>program that generated a (huge) source assembly code. In this generated code, >>>for each piece on every possible square there was a routine you could call. This >>>routine would generate in a blink all the possible moves of that piece! >>> >>>May be the fastest move generator you can dream of on a PC... >>> >>>But maybe not very useful because of the frequent cutoffs you get with simple >>>hash move, captures and killers. >>> >>>The guy has stopped working on his chess program unfortunately... >> >>This is the thing about move generators. It's the first thing that everyone >>does, and they go nuts on them. >> >>I think that it's most important that they don't have bugs, don't go too >>incredibly godawful slow, and fits in well with the rest of the program. >> >>By the way, I wonder how fast your friend's thing really was? It may have been >>so big it blew cache. The 0x88 system is a tiny bit of code with a few little >>data tables, it might actually go faster, I don't know. >> >>bruce > >I was actually thinking of this cache blowout problem when I wrote my message. >At that time (1993 IIRC), we were not aware about the cache problem. I remember >that his move generator was times faster than mine, without remembering more >details, on 386 and 486 computers. Anyway it was impressive. > >It may be not so fast on Pentium processors. > >Anyway, the real speed of the move list generator is not the key point in a >chess program. Recently I rewrote a part of my move generator. It was a totally >incremental move generator, rather slow as I had to call a procedure to get a >move, and I turned it into a fast list generator (all the moves are spit into a >list as fast as possible). I do that only when I know I'm going to need all the >moves (the probability of a cutoff is low). I thought the new technique would be >much faster. > >Well, overall my program is now 1% faster! And maybe the probability of there being a bug in your program has increased by more than 1% ?! > > > Christophe
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