The trick here is to check for legality only in the
(rare) cases we have pinned pieces or a king move
or an en-passant.
This trick is able to increase the speed of perft
of more then 20%!
No functional change.
Further reduce redundancy in move generation.
Veirifed no speed regression on MSVC, Clang and gcc.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Greatly simplify these very performace critical functions.
Amazingly we don't have any speed regression actually under
MSVC we have the same assembly for generate_moves() !
In generate_direct_checks() 'target' is calculated only
once being a loop invariant.
On Clang there is even a slight speed up.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It seems more accurate: lsb is clear while 'first
bit' depends from where you look at the bitboard.
And fix compile in case of 64 bits platforms that
do not use BSFQ intrinsics.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Let first argument to be the 'color'. This allows to align
pos.pieces() signatures with piece_list(), piece_count() and
all the other functions where 'color' argument is passed as
first one.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is more correct given what the function does. In
particular single_bit() returns true also in case of
empty bitboards.
Of course also the usual renaming while there :-)
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Shrinking from [16] to [2][2] is able to speedup
perft of start position of almost 5% !
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Also some microoptimizations, were there from ages
but hidden: the renaming suddendly made them visible!
This is a good example of how better naming lets you write
better code. Naming is really a kind of black art!
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Pre compute castle path so to quickly test
for impeded rule.
This speeds up perft on starting position
of more than 2%.
No functional change
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This allows to retire ClearMaskBB[] and use just
one SquareBB[] array to set and clear a bit.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
They are almost the same, if the function arguments would
have been the same they could even be integrated.
Also a bit of renaming while there.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Skip calling promotion generation functions in
the very common case of no possible promotion
evasion. Also retire generate_pawn_captures()
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It should help to avoid recalculating check squares
of sliding attackers for queen when already done for
bishops and rooks. Of course this helps when there are
bishop, rook and queen on the board !
Fixed also a subtle bug (use of same variable b in while
condition and in condition body) introduced recently by
revision d655147e8c that triggers
in case we have at least 2 non-pawn discovered check pieces.
This is very rare that's why didn't show in the node count
verification where we actually have a case of 2 dc pieces
in position 14, but one is a pawn.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
During generation of non-captures checks (in qsearch)
we don't consider castling moves that give check,
this patch includes also this rare case. Verified with
perft that all the non-capture checks are now generated.
There should be a very little slowdown due to the extra
work, but actually I failed to measure it. I don't expect
any ELO improvment, there is even no functional change on
the standard depth 12 search, it is just to have a correct
move generator.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
The full movegen patch series shows a speed up of almost
6% (!) on perft, and code is much more readable too.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
MV_CHECK is an alias of the more appropiate named
MV_NON_CAPTURE_CHECK so use only the latter.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
The aim is to have shorter names without losing
readibility but, if possible, increasing it.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It's only necessary to do the checking at the end of every non-const
member (including the constructors and from_fen()) of class Position.
Once the post-condition of every modifier guarantees the class invariant,
we don't need to verify sanity of the position as preconditions for outside
callers such as movegen, search etc. For non-class types such as Move and
Square we still need to assert of course.
Suggested by Rein Halbersma.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
After previous patch is no more needed to pass
the color, becuase it is always the side to move.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It worked by accident because we always called both directions,
but definition was wrong.
Functional change due to different generation order, but
perft numbers are the correct ones.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
We disjoint pseudo legal detection from full legal detection.
It will be used by future patches.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use Square instead. At the end is the same because we were
anyway foreseen operators on mixed terms (Square, SquareDelta).
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
MSVC (and possibly other compilers) does not inline
as requested, so force it to do so.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Move the castling condition test out of the
function. This avoids a function call most of
the times.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Functional change due only to moves reorder. Anyhow after
5242 games at 15"+0.1 TC verified we have no regression.
Mod vs Orig 994 - 958 - 3290 +2 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
We must be able to filter out also moves where move_is_ok()
is false.
And actually we are. Tested on all the default position injecting
a number from -1000000 to 1000000 casted to a Move.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Should be already inlined by the compiler when
optimizing but better safe than sorry ;-)
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This patch greatly cleanups generation of pawn moves but
we change the order in which moves are generated so there is
a change in functionality, but not in perft.
The only real functionality change is that now when type == CHECK
we generate knight underpromotion captures only if give check and
not always as before.
Perft is 2% faster and fully verified.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Mostly suggested by Justin (UncombedCoconut), the 0ULL -> 0 conversion
is mine.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Instead of one comparison in while() condition use two,
the first to check if the piece is exsistant and the second
to loop across pieces of that type.
This should help branch prediction in cases we have only
one piece of the same type, for instance for queens, the
first branch is always true and the second is almost always
false.
Increased speed of 0.3-0.5 % on Gcc pgo compiles.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
We don't need to generate captures and non
captures in a separate step. This gives another
7% push to perft speed.
yes, I know, it is totally useless :-)
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is now no more needed to know dc candidates
inside MovePicker, so avoid calculating there.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Big cleanup and semplification of pawns evasions that
now are pseudo-legal as the remaining moves. This
allow us to remove a lot of tricky code.
Verified against perft: no functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This allow a big semplification in move generation
that will be committed with the next patch. And makes
handling of evasions similar to the other type of moves.
This patch plus the next seem to improve also on
the performance side because after 640 games to
verify there are no hidden regressions we are at +9 ELO
Verified with perft no functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Generate captures of checking piece and blocking
evasions in one go.
Also reduce of one indentation level early returning
when we have a double check.
Verified with perft no functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Check generation is used only in qsearch and
only at Depth(0), castling moves that give check
are very rare overall and even almost not exsistent
at Depth(0).
So retire this almost never used code that adds
a small but consistent slow down in the normal path.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Because discovery checks are very rare it is better to handle
them all in one go and strip from usual check generation
function.
Also rewrite direct checks generation to use piece lists instead
of pop_1st_bit()
On perft test we have a +6% of speed up and is verified we
generate the same moves, although in a different order.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This patch make the piece list always terminated by SQ_NONE,
so that we can use a simpler and faster loop in move
generation.
Speedup is about 0.6%.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
A better and more specific name. Also a bit of code reshuffle.
Verified No functional change and No performance change
for the whole series.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Rewrite in the form normally used in other similar
functions like generate_pawn_noncaptures()
This allow an easier reading of the pawn moves generators
and simplify a bit the code.
No functional change (tested on more then 100M nodes).
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
A bunch of trivial code style and comment fixes.
Among them there is a real fix for a subtle case
involving promotion moves.
We currently check that a pawn push to 8/1th rank
must be a promotion, but we don't check the contary,
i.e. that a pawn push on a different rank must NOT be
a promotion. Note that, funny enough, we perform this
control for all the other pieces, but not for the pawns!
This patch fixes this really corner case.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Remove a bunch of difficult and tricky code to test
legality of castle and ep moves and instead use a slower
but simpler check against the list of generated legal moves.
Because these moves are very rare the performance impact
is small but code semplification is ver big: almost 100 lines
of difficult code removed !
No functionality change. No performance change (strangely enough
there is no even minimal performance regression in pgo builds but
instead a slightly and unexpected increase).
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
In qsearch at depth 0 we generate only captures and checks.
Queen promotion moves are generated among the captures, but
under-promotion moves (both captures and non-captures) are
never generated even if they could give a discovery check.
This patch fixes this limitation extending generate_pawn_noncaptures()
to generate also check moves when required.
Apart for adding the (rare) case of an under-promotion that gives
discovery check, the patch is also a good cleanup because removes
generate_pawn_checks() altoghter.
This patch does the code clean-up but not enables the functional
change so to allow an easier debug.
No functional change and no performance change (actually a very
very small speed increase).
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
We are generating also king moves that give check !
Of course these moves are illegal so are in any case
filtered out in MovePicker. Neverthless we should avoid
to generate them.
Also simplify a bit the code.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is in line with attackers_to() and is shorter and
piece is already redundant because is passed as template
parameter anyway.
Integrate also pawn_attacks_from() in the attacks_from()
family so to have an uniform attack info API.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use the definition in the few places where is needed.
As a nice side effect there is also an optimization in
generate_evasions() where the bitboard of enemy pieces
is computed only once and out of a tight loop.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is a bit longer but much easier to understand especially
for people new to the sources. I remember it was not trivial
for me to understand the returned attack bitboard refers to
attacks launched from the given square and not attacking the
given square.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Most of them are not required to be public and are
used in one place only so remove them and use its
definitions.
Also rename piece_attacks_square() in piece_attacks()
to be aligned to the current naming policy.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
These functions return bitboard of attacking pieces,
not the attacks themselfs so reflect this in the name.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Instead of pawn_attacks(Color c, Square s) define as
pawn_attacks(Square s, Color c) to be more aligned to
the others attack info functions.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Remove undefined functions sliding_attacks() and ray_attacks()
and retire square_is_attacked(), use the corresponding definition
instead. It is more clear that we are computing full attack
info for the given square.
Alos fix some obsolete comments in move generation functions.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This patch is built on Tord idea to use functions instead of
templates to access position's bitboards. This has the added advantage
that we don't need fallback functions for cases where the piece
type or the color is a variable and not a constant.
Also added Joona suggestion to workaround request for two types
of pieces like bishop_and_queens() and rook_and_queens().
No functionality or performance change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use a single template to get bitboard representation of
the position given the type of piece as a constant.
This removes almost 80 lines of code and introduces an
uniform notation to be used for querying for piece type.
No functional change and no performance change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is used mainly in a bunch of inline oneliners
just below its definition. So substitute it with
the explicit definition and avoid information hiding.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This avoids calculating the array entry position
at each access and gives another boost of almost 1%.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
previous used move_is_legal to verify that the move from the TT
was legal, and the old version of move_is_legal only works when
the side to move is not in check. Fixed this by adding a separate,
slower version of move_is_legal which works even when the side to
move is in check.
This is another moves serialization macro but this time
focused on pawn moves where the 'from' square is given as
a delta from the 'to' square.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is very rare we have pawns on 7(2) rank, so we
can skip the promotion handling stuff in most cases.
With this patch pawn moves generation is almost 20% faster.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
A promotion move is not considered a possible evasion as it could be.
Bug introduced by patch
Convert also generate_pawn_blocking_evasions() to new API (7/5/2009)
Bug spotted by Kenny Dail.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Rename to move_is_promotion() to be more clear, also add
a new function move_promotion_piece() to get the
promotion piece type in the few places where is needed.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
We can have false positives, but these are filtered out
anyhow by following conditions so they are harmless.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Tests on Joona luxury iCore7 QUAD show that speed increase
against standrd 64bit routine is between 3% and 4%.
So it seems a good thing to have. Also the user feedback at
startup regarding the compile and the hardware detection can
be an useful debug tool.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
In MovePicker consider killer moves as a separate
phase from non-capture picking.
Note that this change guarantees that killer1 is always
tried before killer2. Until now, because scoring difference
of the two moves was just 1 point, if psqt tables of killer1
gave a lower value then killer2, the latter was tried as first.
After 999 games at 1+0 we have
Mod vs Orig: +245 =527 -227 +6 ELO
Not a lot but patch is anyhow something worth to have.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It shows almost no improvment and adds a good
bunch of complexity.
So remove for now. No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
We don't need different names between a function and a
template. Compiler will know when use one or the other.
This let use restore original count_1s_xx() names instead of
sw_count_1s_xxx so to simplify a bit the code.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use a better condition to find candidate direct check pawns.
In particular consider only pawns in the front ranks of the
enemy king, this greatly reduces pawns candidates bitboard
that now is empty more then 90% of the time so that we
can early skip further tests.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Be more strict, is not enough dc bitboard is not empty, but
needs to inclde also at least one pawn.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
We can parametrize for the capture direction too.
Also use a single template parameter and calculate (at
compile time) remainin parameters directly in the function.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
In case we have a correct white pawn move but pawn
is black (or the contrary) we fail to detect the
move as illegal.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Instead of loop across all legal moves to find a mate
loop across possible check moves only.
This reduces more then 10 times the number of moves to
check for a possible mate.
Also rename generate_checks() in generate_non_capture_checks()
so to better clarify what the function does.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Avoid calculating piece attacks if there aren't
available check sqaures for the given piece.
About 15% of cases. Not a biggie but still something
especially in the middle game where king is well covered
inside his castle.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is slower the previous uglier but faster code.
So completely restore old one for now :-(
Just leave in the rework of status backup/restore in do_move().
We will cherry pick bits of previous work once we are sure
we have fixed the performance regression.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
They hide the underlying uniform function call with
no benefit.
A little bit more verbose but now is clear what happens.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
In generate_piece_moves() to be more uniform with other
functions. Unfortunatly the different number of calling arguments
do not allow us to easily integrate in generate_piece_moves()
template family.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Small code tidy up and a little optimization
to avoid calling generate_piece_blocking_evasions()
when blockSquares is empty (30% of cases).
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Now that we have removed sliders checkers attacks
from evasion's set we can simplyfy legality check.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba