Talk:Bitboard

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Are most chess bitboard engines rotated? Does anyone have information on this or can lend an expert opinion?

- A question: Why is it said about a dozen times that implementing a bitboard is rather hard to do? There are a lot of things that are difficult (look at all of the math articles) but i think Wikipedia should be informative, rather than rating the stuff... Anyone agree?

Yes, I agree. In general, this article is written in a very casual style that in not encyclopedic. Rm999 02:40, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

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Sorry about the style. It's just an overview and I was hoping someone would help expand it. I don't have time right now.

I think it could be longer and needs:

• diagrams
• code examples
• citations

All this will make the article more formal. In particular I think it is extremely hard to get the idea without any diagrams.

Glen Pepicelli 05:42, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why the revert?

Glen Pepicelli, I hadn't considered my changes controversial. I think that it's obvious in a section called "Pros" in an article about bitboards that you're describing the advantages of bitboards, so I removed the redundancy. What was unclear in my new text? -Slamb 05:34, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Slamb: Yeah your probably right that the wording is really bad. The word memory used twice. Lets change it to your version. User:Glen Pepicelli 04:12, 18 September 2006 (UTC) I don't know what I was looking at before, thanks.

[edit] Overemphasis of "difficutly" in using bitboards

I have been using bitboards in my chess programs and I believe this article is not professional in the display of the use of bitboards. Bitboards is not just for "extreme" optimization but it will also make implementation of some trivial things without the uncessary hassle of writing loops. For example safe mobility can be done more clearly than it can be done with arrays. Bitboards code are also easy to understand if one has atleast some expirence in it. This is like comparing a guy who dosen't know anything about arrays and introduce him to arrays. Of course the learning curve is high in bitboards but writing code is actually easier with it. Some facts are also dead wrong. I just edited some text about how squares A1 will always be the least significant bit and how H8 will always be the most significant bit. Also you do not need to have your program with exactly a bitboard for each piece for each side. Fast implementatiosn can be made with more generic code like Pieces[6] and PiecesSide[2]. So if you want white knights you could do something like Pieces[N]&PiecesSide[WHITE]. If you need to use either only white or only black knights at parts of bottleneck code you can precompute them and use them on the fly. I believe a serious revision of this articile is needed.