Bad bishop is a bishop whose Mobility is restricted by own pawns. As opposed to normal mobility problems, this situation is semi-permanent (more so if the position is blocked), which fact justifies singling it out as another evaluation term. Bad bishop is not such a liability if it is placed outside the pawn chain (Bf5 in the Slav). For that reason some programs, like Crafty, score a bishop as bad only if its forward mobility is impaired.
For a bitboard-based program a feasible approach would be to create an array of 64 bitboards, indexed by a Bishop's position, and marking the pawn positions which would make our bishop bad.
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Bad bishop is a bishop whose Mobility is restricted by own pawns. As opposed to normal mobility problems, this situation is semi-permanent (more so if the position is blocked), which fact justifies singling it out as another evaluation term. Bad bishop is not such a liability if it is placed outside the pawn chain (Bf5 in the Slav). For that reason some programs, like Crafty, score a bishop as bad only if its forward mobility is impaired.
For a bitboard-based program a feasible approach would be to create an array of 64 bitboards, indexed by a Bishop's position, and marking the pawn positions which would make our bishop bad.
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