Chess Optimizations

Question

ok, so i have been working on my chess program for a while and i am beginning to hit a wall. i have done all of the standard optimizations (negascout, iterative deepening, kille

Answer 1

Answering an old question.

Assuming you already have a working transposition table.

Late Move Reduction. That gave my program about 100 elo points and it is very simple to implement.

In my experience, unless your implementation is very inefficient, then the actual board representation (0x88, bitboard, etc.) is not that important.

Although you can criple you chess engine with bad performance, a lightning fast move generator in itself is not going to make a program good.

The search tricks used and the evaluation function are the overwhelming factors determining overall strength.

And the most important parts, by far, of the evaluation are Material, Passed pawns, King Safety and Pawn Structure.

The most important parts of the search are: Null Move Pruning, Check Extension and Late Move reduction.

Your program can come a long, long way, on these simple techniques alone!