Global Move List

In the first version of Monarch I used an Exhaustive Global List of Chess Moves.  This is a list of about (from memory), 47k moves which collectively describe all possible moves on the chess board.  So an example of one move might be white Bishop on b2 takes black Rook on e5.  This will be one of the moves in the table.  I think this approach may well work well with Magic Bitboards – so I intend to implement it in Maverick.  The main advantage is you can store move specific information in the move’s record (e.g. the changes in hash value).  Also generating moves is just a matter of storing a pointer to the move in question.  Obviously the downside is the memory used to store the table and the negative impact on the cache.

This structure was first popularized by Gnu Chess 3.  Subsequent engines which have used a similar approach are Ferret by Bruce Moreland and Diep by Vincent Diepeveen.

So my first task is to classify every possible move into “move types”.  This will be used in switch statements to make and unmake moves quickly.  Here’s my first pass:

//===========================================================//
// Types of Moves
//===========================================================//
#define MOVE_CASTLE 0
#define MOVE_PAWN_PUSH1 1
#define MOVE_PAWN_PUSH2 2
#define MOVE_PxPAWN 3
#define MOVE_PxPIECE 4
#define MOVE_PxP_EP 5
#define MOVE_PROMOTION 6
#define MOVE_CAPTUREPROMOTION 7
#define MOVE_PIECE_MOVE 8
#define MOVE_PIECExPIECE 9
#define MOVE_PIECExPAWN 10
#define MOVE_KING_MOVE 11
#define MOVE_KINGxPIECE 12
#define MOVE_KINGxPAWN 13

 Now I need to think about generating the Global Move List!