Chess Optimizations

Question

ok, so i have been working on my chess program for a while and i am beginning to hit a wall. i have done all of the standard optimizations (negascout, iterative deepening, kille

Answer 1

Its quite an old question, I was just searching questions on chess and found this one unanswered. Well it may not be of any help to you now, but may prove helpful to other users.

I didn't see null move pruning, transposition tables.. are you using them? They would give you a big boost...

One thing that gave me a big boost was minimizing conditional branching... Alot of things can be precomputed. Search for such opportunities.

Most modern PCs have multiple cores so it would be a good idea making it multithreading. You don't necessarily need to go MDF(f) for that.

I wont suggest moving your code to bitboard. Its simply too much work. Even though bitboards could give a boost on 64 bit machines.

Finally and most importantly chess literature dominates any optimizations we may use. optimization is too much work. Look at open source chess engines, particularly crafty and fruit/toga. Fruit used to be open source initially.