Short Description
Bitboards are used in many of the world's best chess playing programs. They help the programs analyze chess positions with few CPU instructions and hold a massive number of positions in memory efficiently.
Bitboards are interesting because they allow the computer to answer some questions about game state with one logical operation. For example, if a chess program wants to know if the white player has any pawns in the center of the board (center four squares) it can just compare a bitboard for the player's pawns with one for the center of the board using a logical AND operation. If there are no center pawns then the result will be zero.
Query results can also be represented using bitboards. For example, the query "What are the squares between X and Y?" can be represented as a bitboard. These query results are generally pre-calculated, so that a program can simply retrieve a query result with one memory load.
However, as a result of the massive compression and encoding, bitboard programs are not easy for software developers to either write or debug.
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