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What techniques would you use to make an engine for very low memory/power hardware?

Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2022 12:49 am
by Dragon-Hatcher
I was thinking about this earlier. By low memory I mean < a kb and by low power I mean microcontroller level.

One thought I had is that you would want to use make/unmake instead of copying the board in order to save memory.

You would probably also want to have a good static evaluation function becuase you won't be able to search many positions.

Any other techniques you can think of/reccomend? Any prior art? I've read about a few early chess engines but nothing I've found has given many implementation details.

Re: What techniques would you use to make an engine for very low memory/power hardware?

Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2022 10:46 pm
by delphi_coder
The situation seems as nightmare. Less than a kilobyte for code+data or just data? I remember one good chess program from the old MS-DOS days but it also had hundreds of kilobytes to function. I've a doubt if you can write a code for a movegen assuming just 12bit for single move you are unable to store the moves for just 2 ply depth