Not sure if you're aware of this, but the technique of representing a chess board as a 64-bit bitmap is in fact the method used by pretty much all chess engines

Not sure if you're aware of this, but the technique of representing a chess board as a 64-bit bitmap is in fact the method used by pretty much all chess engines these days. These 64-bit unsigned long longs are known as "bitboards". https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Bitboards https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Bitboards