What is the maximum strength of a chess engine with a board representation using an 8 by 8 array?

Question

I am trying to program my first chess engine, and I am using chessprogramming.wikispaces.com as a resource. My first attempt was to use bitboards considering their performance perks and for the fact that popular engines such as Deep Blue used bitboards; however, I found implementation very difficult, and came to the conclusion that I should start small for my first engine. I would instead like to use an 8 by 8 array, but I would like to know the strength of my engine with the array compared to using bitboards. If possible, please provide an approximate chess rating for an engine's maximum strength using an 8 by 8 array.

Answer 1

8 by 8 might be a bit slower, as a beginner however, your program will be stronger if you use 8 by 8, since you will make far less mistakes, and since it won't be too performant anyways (at least mine isn't).

So even if you implement both perfectly, a bitboard program might get 1 ply deeper in the Brute-Force tree than an 8 by 8. But the really effective stuff is e.g. using Alpha Beta algorithm with move ordering and such.

An 8 by 8 engine with good alpha beta is always gonna beat a bitboard with badly implemented alpha beta. So no reason for using bitboards in your first progam ;)