NP-Completeness of Hashtable Packing for Magic Bitboards in Chess
2025-06-11
This paper proves the strong NP-completeness of the hashtable packing problem encountered when optimizing magic bitboards in chess. The author reduces the 3-partition problem to the hashtable packing problem, demonstrating that finding a minimal-size packing is computationally intractable. This implies that heuristics must be used in practice instead of searching for optimal solutions. This has significant implications for chess engine performance optimization, as magic bitboards are crucial for efficient move generation.
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