Bitboard implementation, how much time?

[Rebel]

How much time did it take you to convert:

1. Mailbox -> Rotated bitboard
2. Mailbox -> Magic bitboard

And have it 100% bug free.

[lucasart]

How much time did it take you to convert:

1. Mailbox -> Rotated bitboard
2. Mailbox -> Magic bitboard

And have it 100% bug free.

I never used mailbox

[bob]

How much time did it take you to convert:

1. Mailbox -> Rotated bitboard
2. Mailbox -> Magic bitboard

And have it 100% bug free.

Vague question.

FIrst move generator for Crafty, late 1994, took 3 months. Rotated bitboards came later. Another 3 months to work out the details and get code working. Moving to magic took an hour.

It is not a day's work. Magic was fastest because we had existing code. Those that originally used my rotated bitboard idea had the same advantage.

[Evert]

I wrote a basic rotated bitboard engine from scratch (different orientation than described in Bob's paper though) in a few evenings.
I replaced it with "kindergarten" multiplication in one evening or so (this was not only simpler, but also faster).

Afterwards, I wrote a "kindergarten" bitboard engine basically from scratch in an evening (this one dealing with "hoppers" as well as "sliders"). I later extended that to arbitrary rectangular boards with up to 128 squares and width/height < 16 again in a few evenings (took a bit longer because I had to refactor a lot of code).

In other words, not a very long time...
I never wrote a mailboard program, but my first chess program used an 8x8 char array. I never reused code from that for anything though.

[jdart]

I did 1. back in '96-'97 and it was 6 months between releases. I think I did the bulk of it in a couple of months though. Crafty had done this earlier but I didn't really understand Crafty's implementation and my square numbering was different, so my implementation was done from scratch.

Then I did rotated->magic, but like many I am using a modified version of Pradyu Kannan's code for that. So that was easier.

[IWB]

Hmm, reading the numbers here is doesn't seem too unlikely that someone who knows Crafty can rewrite fruit within a few weeks/monthes to bitboards...


Bye
Ingo

[Mincho Georgiev]

1 month to wrote new generator and debug it. 2 weeks after it the program was 100% translated. It is a simple program though.

[hgm]

Hmm, reading the numbers here is doesn't seem too unlikely that someone who knows Crafty can rewrite fruit within a few weeks/monthes to bitboards...


Bye
Ingo

Oh, I am pretty sure I could do that in a week. (I'd use 'Kindergarten bitboards' rather than magics, because I dislike big tables.)

For micro-Max it would probably take less than a day.

[Sven]

For micro-Max it would probably take less than a day.

Not too difficult when considering that the micro-Max source code itself isn't much bigger than a bitboard

Sven

[Richard Allbert]

Assuming a "week" is four evenings, and a full weekend day..

Using Bob's paper, rotated took a month, and I also needed the Crafty source to get my head around it.

Magics took a couple of weeks, again, CPW, Glaurung Source, Pradu's posts on this site were all needed to understand it.