Author: Pete R.
Date: 13:58:40 07/15/00
To take a different tack, I'm not particularly interested in the debate about whether DJ is GM strength or not. When I can set up a position on my home PC, and it can tell me as well or better than Kasparov can what the best move is and *why*, in terms I can understand, then there will be nothing important left to do in computer chess. But that's still a long way off, past the point when a home PC can supply enough horsepower to have a program beat the World Champ in match play. Playing good enough to win and understanding chess as well as a GM are two different things. And frankly from a commercial standpoint I'm more interested in training software that can do the latter, rather than just beat me up. In terms of DJ's performance, the question I'm musing about is whether a top of the line 8-way processor general purpose computer may be sufficient to do the job of beating humanity, subject to some lucky or brilliant tweaks in evaluation code. In other words, is the matter of coming up with better positional moves in blocked positions, thwarting wing onslaughts, etc. a matter of putting in so much *more* evaluation code that an 8-way server can't do the job? DB got around this by having massive amounts of eval parameters, all done in special hardware. But the recent performances, warts and all, of top multiprocessor programs begs the question of how much more horsepower is really needed. This is simply speculation of course, like most of these topics, but only the programmers would have a feel for whether they need another 1000 eval terms, or just better tuning.
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