Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 16:45:25 11/08/00
Go up one level in this thread
On November 08, 2000 at 03:08:27, Uri Blass wrote:
>On November 08, 2000 at 00:15:28, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
><snipped>
>>All this was about the best program of 1990 at 500GHz against the best program
>>of today at 500MHz.
>
>There is a misunderstanding
>
>This discussion began because of the question if the best program of 1990 at
>500GHz are enough to equal kramnik(You claimed that 500mhz is enough with
>software improvement).
>
>I claimed that 500Ghz of 1990 is not enough to equal kramnik because it is even
>not enough to equal 1Ghz of today(the point is that 1Ghz is weaker than
>kramnik).
>
>> 77 Chess Genius 1.0 486/50-66 MHz 2182 23 -23 931 54% 2154
>> 83 Fritz 3.0 486/50-66 MHz 2157 20 -20 1226 45% 2190
>
>So it seems that the difference in rating between Fritz6a and Genius1 is
>274-(2182-2157)=274-25=249 elo.
>
>>>I believe that the difference is smaller for older programs and my guess is that
>>>programs like genius3 are going to earn less elo from doubling speed from
>>>500 mgh to 1gh relative to the new programs so 70 elo per speed doubling is not
>>>the actual value even without diminishing returns.
>>
>>
>>
>>But 30 elo per doubling speed is probably a lower bound, that's why I did the
>>two evaluations (with 30 and with 70).
>
>I am not sure if the estimate of 30 is a lower bound.
>My impression is that there are a lot of things that programs do not understand
>when time is not going to help.
>
>Thorsten posted a position that black is losing from a correspondence game when
>most programs do not evaluate correctly the king attack and tiger give more than
>+2 evaluation.
>
>At blitz it may be less important because tiger can do mistakes and miss the win
>against better hardware but I believe that if gambittiger gets 3 minutes per
>move on 1Gh machine nothing can stop it from winning.
>
>Here is the relevant position again.
>
>[D]rn1q1rk1/6bp/p2p4/1p1Pp2n/6b1/2NBB3/PP1QN2P/2KR3R w - - 0 1
>
>Some programs do not see here even after hours that white can get a wining
>advantage after the opening.
>
>My impression is that programs with wrong evaluation have no way to stop gambit
>from getting this position and wining the game and 24 hours per move are not
>going to help because seeing in this position that white is winning is too late
>and they had to see it some moves before.
>
>Fritz6a has not this knowledge but I believe that it probably has also decisive
>knowledge against old programs of 1990.
>
>This is the reason for my impression that the 300 elo per 10 doubling may be too
>optimistics.
There is something that could well compensate for the effect you describe.
I think that some programs for 1990 (or around) had a lot of knowledge to
compensate for the lack of depth they could reach at that time.
If we take the example of black trapped bishop on a2 or h2, you know very well
yourself that some modern program amongst the top ones do not have this
knowledge. Some older programs including Rebel for example have this knowledge.
The same for pins. I even believe that king attacks were treated more seriously
by programmers in the 80s than by programs of today. For example ChessGenius for
Palm, which is the Mephisto Roma code (1987) seems more aware of king attacks
(and evaluates them rather high) than Genius5 itself.
Programs of 1990 knew that they could be outsearched, and the programmers used
to add knowledge in the program to compensate for this. Between 1990 and 2000, I
think the most successful programs have been the one that had less knowledge but
were able to outsearch their opponents. For them it was outsearch the opponent
or die (because of lack of positional understanding).
That's why I fear that modern programs on slower hardware could suffer more from
the fact that they will be outsearched.
>It is also possible that the 70 elo per doubling is not wrong but 70*10 is not
>700.
>I mean that if you play a match between equal programs when one hardware is
>twice faster you get 70 elo difference but when you play a match between equal
>programs when one hardware is 1024 faster you get less than 700 elo difference
>when part of it is not because of diminishing returns.
It will all depend on the time controls. Give a modern program 1 second per move
and a very old one 1024 seconds and I'm sure the modern one will not win one
game.
But give the modern one 3 minutes and the old one 3072 minutes (51 hours and 12
minutes) and probably the winning rate will be lower.
In any case, the difference might well be above 400 elo points, and
unfortunately the evaluation systems I know are not able to measure an elo
difference bigger than 400 points between direct opponents...
Christophe
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.