Author: Scott Ludwig
Date: 17:45:18 09/20/99
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Thanks for the kind words Christophe. I'm the author of PocketChess. The engine is based on SCP - a 1987 version of Stanbeck's SCP, which is public domain, which later morphed into gnu chess. I made a lot of changes to it, but at its core it uses no hashing of any sort, its position evaluation is simple, attacks generation is brute force, and it is not particularly efficient in design. Its most significant attribute is its small code and data size (14K code / 8K data compiled for 68K). At the time I knew nothing about chess, and found it a fun challenge to fit a chess game into the limited resources of the Pilot 1000 back in 1996 when it was first released - I had always wanted an lcd based chess game myself. I didn't expect the warm reception it received from the Palm community. I later ported the same game into versions for Windows CE, Psion 5, and Royal daVinci (you can find it on http://www.eskimo.com/~scottlu). There is also a version of it running on Newtons called DeepGreen. I am working on v2.0 at the moment, which has a new engine that I have written - it is stronger, faster, better :-). I will get v2.0 rated on the major handhelds. On a Palm, the cpu is a 68328, a variant of the 68000. The standard clock speed is 16mhz, and the average clocks per instruction is 12. There is no instruction or data cache, so you average about 1.37 million instructions per second. Compare that to the fastest CE unit available currently, the 131mhz mips cpu found in the Casio E-100/E-105. Various versions of the mips cpu are made, each with different size data/code caches. The cpu is RISC superscalar design and produces more than 1 instruction per clock. Caching effects and main memory bus speed / wait states / instruction counts make an exact speed comparison difficult without benchmarks, but suffice it to say that the fastest CE device is many times faster than the 68K palm pilot - as an example PocketChess on just about any CE device is much more difficult than the Palm version, as I continually get reminded in email! Scott
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