Apr 14, 2007

[Other] Stack done

I now have a working stack done for the Board class. It keeps track of trivial things like castling rights and en passant squares to make unmakeMove possible, but also what moves were played to reach the position and if the position is a check or not.

Things like determining if the last move played (i.e. in the last instance of the recursive alpha-beta) was a promotion, or a capture, or a check etc. are very simple now.

I should have done this a long time ago, but well, the first thing I wrote was the Board class and I simply did not realize what was really needed in it back then.

As I said the makeMove method now determines if the position before making the move is a check or not. I do not know if this is really nescessary, but considering pretty much every node uses this information in one way or another it is probably ok.

The problem is deciding if the next move to be played will be a check without actually playing it on the board. This is another matter though and I will probably implement a gen_checks to take care of that.

Anyway the way it works now the move generation is about 20% slower than without the checks, but all in all it should turn out to be slightly faster when used in the search. And most importantly it will make things like futility pruning and LMR much easier to adjust.

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