I’m still somewhat baffled by the performance of my checkers program. I keep pondering that perhaps it would be a good idea to take all the lessons I’ve learned, burn it down, and try again with Milhouse². After all, in the words of Tom Duff (who may not have said this, but should have) “any program worth writing is worth rewriting”. Toward that end, I was reconsidering the data representation that I used, and revisited this nifty page on Bitboards:

Checker Bitboard Tutorial.

I basically use bitboards already, but at the very end of the page, you’ll see mention of a novel if somewhat unobvious representation credited to Thotsaphon Thanatipanonda, which simplifies move and jump generation. My own code for this was laboriously constructed using a python program, so it would be nice if we could shrink that code a bit and make it more straightforward. One key that Ed mentions is that it requires machine language rotate instructions, since C does not have a rotate instruction. I thought I’d try to see what gcc does with the obvious implementation. So, I quickly wrote the following function:

inline uint32_t
rol7(uint32_t val)
{
    return (val << 7) | (val >> 25) ;
}

(This function uses uint32_t to make sure we have 32 bit values. You can find the defines in stdint.h.) As perhaps we should expect, gcc is smart enough to turn this into a single machine language rorl. This means that we can write a move generator without any difference in handling the even or odd rows, which currently doubles at least the size of my own move generator. Pretty nifty.