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Subject: Re: Crafty and Cray Blitz Questions to Prof. Hyatt

Author: Jason Williamson

Date: 04:18:13 10/10/00

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On October 09, 2000 at 22:31:33, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On October 09, 2000 at 13:59:55, Aaron Tay wrote:
>
>>On October 09, 2000 at 13:38:37, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On October 09, 2000 at 12:46:27, Joshua Lee wrote:
>>>
>>>>Since you can't compare them by playing each other what about comparing
>>>>printouts? Are there any printouts that have NPS Depth line etc. If i had this i
>>>>would attempt. I did look at a game against Chiptest where CB had 14 Ne6 but
>>>>played Na4<-- not the losing move but not as good as Ne6 CB get's a queen Vs 3
>>>>minor pieces which is not easy but it would be alot better than the situation
>>>>before if CB could keep his queen on and exchange rooks it makes it easier. As
>>>>Black's only chances would be to obtain a new queen not likely. So the outcome
>>>>is probably a draw but this is just my guess.  To see this move for Crafty would
>>>>be over 14Ply on my 800Mhz Athlon just to give you some idea. If you can
>>>>elaborate on CB's earlier versions and how they played maybe this will answer my
>>>>questions and help you to improve on crafty.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Sometimes it's all about asking the right question.
>>>>
>>>>thank you
>>>
>>>
>>>Actually I did this a couple of years ago and posted the results in r.g.c.c I
>>>believe.  I took a couple of the world championship 1986 games (the wc won by
>>>CB for the second time in a row) and had Crafty 'annotate' the games.  It was
>>>uncanny how they agreed tactically.  Of course, 1986 CB was doing maybe 100-200K
>>>nodes per second max, so crafty had a big edge in speed.  But it found _zero_
>>>tactical mistakes by CB.
>>>
>>>I analyzed the games partly in a discussion with Chris Whittington where he
>>>was into the usual mode of criticizing Cray Blitz for any reason.  He picked on
>>>one particular move as looking foolish.  Someone else pointed out that CSTal
>>>played the _same_ move, as it was tactically forced to avoid losing a pawn,
>>>but of course that didn't make any difference.  I became interested in how
>>>Crafty would compare.  I gave crafty more time than CB had, using faster
>>>hardware than CB had (1986 hardware for CB, remember), and it couldn't find
>>>any move it would label as a mistake or oversight.
>>>
>>>CB was tactically very strong.  In most positional cases the two programs were
>>>in agreement as well, which is not surprising since I wrote both.
>>>
>>>The main advantage CB might have had back then was far faster hardware than
>>>anything I might run Crafty on in 1986.  Of course Crafty would have run on a
>>>Cray back then, but it would have been far slower as Crafty is not vectorized
>>>while CB was.  I suspect there is not a lot of difference in the two programs
>>>today.  CB might have a tactical edge due to singular extensions and a bit of
>>>selectiveness near the leaf positions, while crafty probably has more >positional (particularly endgame) knowledge (excepting king safety where CB >was clearly better).
>>
>>Sorry to interrupt, but does that mean that as of today you wouldn't bet on
>>Crafty running on your current hardware to beat CB (the lastest/last version)?
>>
>>So when do you anticipate will Crafty overtake CB? In 5 years time, when everone
>>is using better hardware?
>
>
>You will have to rephrase your question a bit.  But to help, if you meant
>"can crafty on the quad xeon play with Cray Blitz on the T90?" the answer
>is _NO_.  CB on the T90 runs at around 7M nodes per second, about 7X faster
>than the quad xeon.  I wouldn't want to play such a handicap match.
>
>On the other hand, if you mean "Can Crafty, on the best box you can get today
>play with CB on the T90?" the answer is yes.  I have some data from Tim Mann's
>21264a machine which is about as fast as my quad xeon, but using a single cpu
>at 667 mhz.  A 16 cpu machine would be faster than Cray Blitz.  And I would
>expect it to win more than it would lose, although I think it would be pretty
>close.

Next question, which costs more the 16 cpu alpha or the 30 million dollar cray?
;)



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