bitboard
Sign in to saveA bitboard is a specialized bit array data structure commonly used in computer systems that play board games, where each bit corresponds to a game board space or piece. This allows parallel bitwise operations to set or query the game state, or determine moves or plays in the game.
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33 sectionsContents
- Description
- Implementation issues
- Processor use
- Pros
- Cons
- Cache and memory use
- Pros
- Cons
- Incremental update
- Precomputed bitmaps and table lookup
- Chess bitboards
- Standard
- Auxiliary bitboard representations
- Rotated bitboards
- Direct hashing
- Magic bitboards
- History
- Other games
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
- External links
- Calculators
- Checkers
- Chess
- Articles
- Code examples
- Implementations
- Open source
- Closed source
- Othello
- Word games
A bitboard is a specialized bit array data structure commonly used in computer systems that play board games, where each bit corresponds to a game board space or piece. This allows parallel bitwise operations to set or query the game state, or determine moves or plays in the game.
Bits in the same bitboard relate to each other by the rules of the game, often forming a game position when taken together. Other bitboards are commonly used as masks to transform or answer queries about positions. Bitboards are applicable to any board game whose progress is represented by the state of, or presence of pieces on, discrete spaces of a gameboard, by mapping of the space states to bits in the data structure. Bitboards are a more efficient alternative board representation to the traditional mailbox representation, where each piece or space on the board is an array element.