Hi all, the macro approach is giving about x2 speed even if not all bitwise operation are using it. Still I am using bignums to pass around bit boards in my code.

compiled binary with regular bitwise operation
> position fen r3k2r/p1ppqpb1/bn2pnp1/3PN3/1p2P3/2N2Q1p/PPPBBPPP/R3K2R w KQkq - 0 1
> perft depth 4
> info string depth= 4 nodes= 4085603 time= 9604. nps= 425406

compiled binary with the macro approach
> position fen r3k2r/p1ppqpb1/bn2pnp1/3PN3/1p2P3/2N2Q1p/PPPBBPPP/R3K2R w KQkq - 0 1
> perft depth 4
> info string depth= 4 nodes= 4085603 time= 5795. nps= 705022

I had to fix lots of bottlenecks in my code to see the nice boost this low level code can give.
Thanks!

Paolo

Il giorno 27 apr 2020, alle ore 00:20, Marc Feeley <feeley@iro.umontreal.ca> ha scritto:


Marc



On Apr 26, 2020, at 9:48 AM, Paolo <pmontrasi@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Brad, thank you for your suggestion.
I ended up in testing something similar to the following example

(define (u64-xor . args-list)
 (##bignum.normalize! 
   (fold
     (lambda (x big) 
       (let ((x-big (if (fixnum? x) (##fixnum->bignum x) x)))
         (##bignum.adigit-bitwise-xor! big 0 x-big 0)
         big))
     (##bignum.make 2 ##bignum.adigit-zeros #f)
     args-list)))

it worked but with no noticeable improvements and this fact helped me in looking elsewhere to find speed problems … I found a lot of them in my code of course ;-)

Well I tried to do my best to fix most of the performance issues and I am now pretty happy with what I have come to, therefore I point you to my code in case you are looking for a fun "chess scheme" challenge.

https://github.com/pmon/coronachess

Thank you for your help, my best
Paolo

Nice!  I’ll have to try it out… As you noticed the name Gambit has its origins in chess… I used to play regularly.  A gambit is a kind of scheme… and it is a calculated risk (which felt quite appropriate for my PhD work which was also risky).

To do high speed calculations on raw 64 bit integers, I would tend to use u64vectors (or even u8vectors) to store the 64 bit integers and to drop down to C when some operation on these integers must be done without creating bignums.  Something along these lines:

(declare
 (standard-bindings)
 (extended-bindings)
 (not safe)
)

(c-declare "#define ELEM0(u64vect) ___BODY_AS(u64vect,___tSUBTYPED)[0]")

(define-macro (u64-xor! v1 v2) ;; v1[0] = v1[0] ^ v2[0]
 `(##c-code "ELEM0(___ARG1) ^= ELEM0(___ARG2);" v1 v2))

(define v1 (u64vector #x0123456789ABCDEF))
(define v2 (u64vector #x00FF00FF00FF00FF))

(println (number->string (u64vector-ref v1 0) 16))
(println (number->string (u64vector-ref v2 0) 16))

(u64-xor! v1 v2)

(println (number->string (u64vector-ref v1 0) 16))

You could create a small library of such macros for the various 64 bit operations, and try to avoid as much as possible conversions to and from bignums which probably incurs a high overhead in your application.

Marc