Hello C World,
I am a beginner to programming and to the C language, so please forgive me if I am not as knowledgable as I should be. As a side project during my first year of programming I've been working on a chess playing program, with a built in AI (as of now it only plays the black pieces). I want it to be strong enough to beat a couple of chess-playing friends of mine(around 1800 strength), or barring that, a low-strength piece of commercial software like Chess-Titans.
However a problem I have been running into is that no matter what I try to do to prune the search tree, the search times seem to be unusually slow. As of now, with alpha-beta pruning, and some sorting functions, it can search at a depth of 5 ply at an average of about 1-2 min. per move. I know that in order to be decent, a program should be able to search at least 7-8 ply.
I know there are more pruning functions that I could add to prune the tree more aggressively. But I can't shake the feeling that that isn't the problem. My friend (non-programmer) suggested that maybe the program isnt' drawing enough resources from the computer. I am sure the basic functions of the code (i.e. the function which checks legality of moves, the piece functions etc.) are poorly optimized, which maybe could cause the slow down. But I have tested with trying to improve the efficiency of the code and it hasn't changed the search times one bit.
Is there anyone with experience as a programmer/Chess-AI programmer who could provide their insight? If requested I could post my code, but be warned its excessively long and maybe a bit obscure..
*(I ran the program locally and looked at it in taskmanager. under memory it says its using 680K. Could that be relevant to the slow search times?)