TalkChess.com

There are many optimizations available, albeit at a cost in complexity. An example: When scanning through a move list to mark checks, it's possible to take advantage of the situation where moves of the same man appear contiguously in the list. This can be done by computing (or looking up) data speci...

As mentioned before, Symbolic outputs some special scores in a non numeric format. A mate in four is "MateIn4" and a lose in twelve is "LoseIn12". There aren't any spaces because of the way Symbolic uses a single token for score I/O. The "MateInN" format is taken in part from Crafty's similar "MatN"...

Symbolic has two routines that work directly with checking determination without move execution. The first is a rather long and complicated function that takes a move list and sets the checking flag in each checking move. The second is the routine that generates capturing and/or checking moves. Both...

To determine if a move will give check before actually executing the move requires a lot a work. This is because of the special case moves: castling, en passant, and the promotions. Symbolic has a routine for efficiently determining move checking status without move execution and it's rather long an...

The bittwiddling part of this is finding the best way to determine if two squares are on a line, what direction the line is, and get a mask to determine if the squares between the two are vacant. Symbolic's toolkit has a lookup table dir[64][64] that returns the direction from the first square inde...

By "positional evaluation score" I mean the total of material, positional, and any other factors into one number. -------- In the early computer chess literature, the score was almost always given from the White point of view and the custom remained for some time. The papers back then would label a ...

How about this idea:

Say that a queen is worth one pound sterling. Then a rook would go for about eleven shilling and tuppence. Positional terms might be expressed in milli-farthings or micro-groats.

One possible thing that you might try is to load a chess program in that memory along with its book and try running it from there. In this way at least the book is all contain in ram and should speed up the program at least in theory, well maybe just a little. Symbolic has this option, and it is us...

How should position evaluation scores be reported when kibitzing in server play?

There are roadblocks coming up quickly for both CPUs and memory. Integrated circuit feature sizes are closing in on one hundred atoms per element. Certain quantum effects, such as insulation between adjacent elements, require a minimum number of atoms and there's no known way to beat the limit. Then...