1659

The Battle of the Lines of Elvas was fought on 14 January 1659, in Elvas, between Portugal and Spain. It ended in a decisive Portuguese victory.

By coincidence 1659 is the exact lines of code that I removed from the iCE source code while reworking its move generators. The move generation code belongs to the oldest modules in iCE. It was created for version 0.1 several years ago. I was not slow or buggy but my coding style changed over time and it did not fit really in anymore. 

iCE has several move generators for quiet moves, tactical moves and check evasions. The all followed the scheme

if (sideToMove == WHITE)
{
    // generate white moves
} else
{
    // do something similar for black
}

This is not really elegant.

Fortunately C++ provides function templates that solve that really nice. It required some code rework including the definition of some new data types. But overall the code now looks much nicer.

As far as I could measure there was no impact on speed and of course the new move generators pass the perft unit test again.

iCE 2.0 v1352 x32 [2014.1.5]
perft        Nodes    Time
  1             20    0 sec
  2            400    0 sec
  3          8.902    0 sec
  4        197.281    0.015 sec
  5      4.865.609    0.109 sec
  6    119.060.324    2.699 sec
 
Perft 1 - 6 executed in 2.823 sec  (43.96 Mnps)

position fen 8/2p5/3p4/KP5r/1R3p1k/8/4P1P1/8 w - -
perft        Nodes    Time
  1             14    0 sec
  2            191    0 sec
  3          2.812    0.015 sec
  4         43.238    0 sec
  5        674.624    0.047 sec
  6     11.030.083    0.312 sec
  7    178.633.661    4.867 sec

Perft 1 - 7 executed in 5.241 sec  (36.32 Mnps)