Chess Engine Design Considerations

My MACE engine is now functional, it does not play very strong yet, so if competing against other engines it loses most of the time. I think I can improved it by tuning the evaluation function, but this will not fix one of the fundamental problems of the engine.


It is too slow !

Slow relates here to the raw speed "nodes per second".

Using intelligent pruning methods like NULL move or LMR one can reduce the number of nodes  the engine considers but there are limits to that. In one point in time the engine is faced with a number of nodes it just has to evaluate. And if it is slow in doing that it will not reach the depths necessary to compete with other engines. It also makes the transposition table less useful as it does contain lesser nodes compared with a fast engine.

I have considered several options to increase the speed

1. Dropping the TMove class and using plain integers as move (saving the construction and destruction)
2. Using magic bitboards instead of rotated bitboards (should increase move generation and execution)
3. Dropping the IO thread that is listening on stdin for new commands, making the engine single threaded and saving the shared memory handling overhead

This requires some major changes to the engine and option 3 is probably not possible with Free Pascal.


I think instead of rewriting large parts of the code about starting a parallel engine project using C++ as language. I've not used C++ for quite some time so I'm probably a lot slower programming at first but it helps me refreshing my skills, which is quite necessary I think.