Would a bitboard representation still be as effective in a dumbed-down chess-like strategy game which has less than 64 positions or would a simpler array based mailbox implementation be more practical?
Our school's AI class has an annual competition where the professor makes up a board game and we have four weeks to create an AI which plays the game. Typically, the pieces are a subset of chess pieces with similar rules and is played on a smaller board. i.e. 8x5, 7x7, etc. I'm not at all sure how using only 40 bits compare to the typical 64 for chess.
My only issue is that I'm not very familiar with C or C++ and would be more comfortable implementing the program in Java. Is their enough support in Java for bit manipulation where I could implement a bitboard representation and if this would add efficiency, would it be worth the added complexity? Would the learning curve be too steep?
My plan is to use Negamax search with AB pruning, quiessence search, transposition tables, killer moves, etc. depending on time. Any other tips for creating a competitive AI in such a short amount of time?
A bitboard would work, but in my opinion, the added effort and complexity just to get it working properly isn't worth any possible gains in computing efficiency later on.
In the overall scale of things, any efficiencies from bitwise masking (& or |) over fetching an element of an array (or even a List or Map) would be largely overshadowed by whatever AI or search algorithm you intend to use.
That is, an algorithm of exponential or polynomial complexity will still take O(e^n) or O(n^d) and what few CPU cycles you save with binary arithmetic over pointer dereferencing will be insignificant.
Just go with the easiest data structure you can use at this point (probably an array, or whatever Collection) and focus on getting your algorithms to work.
Later, if you have time, you can profile your program and if you find that array lookups are taking up, say, 20% of your run-time then maybe, just maybe, consider refactoring everything to bitwise ops.
Personally, I'd look at possible ways to conduct the searches of the solution space in parallel, to maximize multiple CPU cores, or better yet, in a way that can be distributed across multiple compute nodes. Yes, that'd probably qualify you for at least Master's degree if you discover something really clever. :)