Editing Bitboard (section)

====Rotated  bitboards====
Rotated bitboards are complementary bitboard data structures that enable tabularizing of sliding piece attack vectors, one for file attack vectors of rooks, and one each for the diagonal and anti-diagonal attack vectors of bishops (rank attacks of rooks can be indexed from standard bitboards).  With these bitboards, a single table lookup replaces lengthy sequences of bitwise operations.

These bitboards rotate the board occupancy configuration by 90 degrees, 45 degrees, and/or 315 degrees. A standard bitboard will have one byte per rank of the chess board. With this bitboard it's easy to determine rook attacks across a rank, using a table indexed by the occupied square and the occupied positions in the rank (because rook attacks stop at the first occupied square). By rotating the bitboard 90 degrees, rook attacks up and down a file can be examined the same way. Adding bitboards rotated 45 degrees and 315 degrees (-45 degrees) produces bitboards in which the diagonals are easy to examine. The queen can be examined by combining rook and bishop attacks.  Actually rotating a bitboard is an inelegant transformation that can take dozens of instructions.<ref name="Heinz_1997"/><ref name="Hyatt_1999"/>