> 4544Morphic-Chess-ar -- Andreas Raab -- 25 November
>2001
> A long-term project of mine has always been to write
a >nice little chess program for Squeak. But since I 
> haven't done anything on it in the last few months
I'm > just going to throw it at the community to see
if 
> someone is interested in doing a bit more. 
> It's a playing ... but not well :-( So, go get it
from > the objects tool and improve it!"
> Smalltalk at: #ChessConstants put: Dictionary new.

Nice job Andreas!  Quite impressive actually.  Just
discovered two small bugs : it allows castling when
the king is in check and only allows you to promote
pawns to queens, i.e. no subpromotion menu...

To make a long story short, I am also playing with
such a beast myself....  A chess program named Lamneth
which started as a bunch of experiments on alpha-beta
vs NegaScout, transposition table replacement schemes,
etc...

I'm curious about the speed of your chess engine... 
You heavily use bit shifts and bit operators and
generate all moves.  In my case, I tried to implement
a fully legal move generator with chess piece
objects...  I am able to generate around 50000
positions in roughly 2.5 seconds without make/unmake
mechanism, Trans. Table lookup and evaluation.  From
my previous tests, I'll be able to evaluate around
50000 positions in less than 5.5 seconds...  Your
programs reaches around 55000 positions in about 5
seconds...   

My question is, how come using bit operations in
Squeak is not **way** faster than creating objects ? 
Am I missing something ?  BTW, I'm on Win 2000 with
the very latest Squeak updates  on a Pentium 1.7Ghz.


=====
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Benoit St-Jean
bstjean at yahoo.com
ICQ: 130611319 / Yahoo Mssngr: bstjean
http://cactus.swiki.net
"We're only immortal for a limited time", Neil Peart
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