--- Andreas Raab <Andreas.Raab at gmx.de> wrote:

> Well, that's a good question. It most certainly
> _should_ be faster. In fact,
> I put some effort in preventing exhaustive
> allocations (by pre-allocating
> and recycling objects) since measuring showed that
> the overhead of
> allocating and garbage collecting the move, board,
> and player objects took
> roughly 80% of the overall time. And indeed - after
> taking care of these
> allocations the entire engine was four times faster.

Yep... I came to the same conclusion...  Recycle
transposition table entries and limit the allocation
of moves and positions through the use of recycling
and make/unmake.  I am not sure though as how to
pre-allocate...  I though about filling up some kind
of stack with a zillion objects from a forked a low
level process but there's something I don't like about
that.

> almost all moves are valid). And if your allocation
> overhead is only
> remotely close to what I've measured your move
> generator must be three to
> four times faster than mine!

Well... I am recycling a lot...  I though at first
that I could get around all that messy code but it
looks like it's inevitable in a chess program...  All
coordinates and move calculations are done with Points
so I guess that since all the Smalltalk windowing uses
those, this class must be pretty optimized so I'm not
so much penalized...

> BTW, the engine should run like hell with j3. I
> tried it once (but Win32/J3
> crashed on me) so I don't know what the real outcome
> is. But it's all just
> integer arithmetic and recursion so j3 should make a
> _huge_ difference here
> (probably another factor of four or so).

Never tried it...  Will probably give it a closer look
once all is glued together and can play a decent and
completely valid game...

=====
----------------------
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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