Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 16:06:08 08/25/01
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On August 25, 2001 at 16:54:19, Dann Corbit wrote: >On August 25, 2001 at 07:31:52, Bruce Moreland wrote: >[snip] >>If people had been allowed to compete in both categories by bringing two >>machines, I would not have got on the plane. Things like that turn any event >>into a complete farce. > >Suppose that the multiple CPU machines play only against each other and the >single CPU machines play only against each other. Does your statement still >hold? > >I don't really understand your objection. I do find it rather odd that 700-800 >MHz machines had to compete against more than twice the horsepower. > >[snip] Ok to be clear here: i can't remember i ever played a 800Mhz machine there. Secondly, everyone who can make a chessprogram can make his program parallel without much effort. Third, some people, including stefan meyer kahlen, will find out that their program is single cpu faster than dual. If SMK was wrong here then it was a political decision to go for the single title. Considering Junior won the tournament, i think that's enough proof that it was not so smart to go single cpu from Stefan, but well his official statement is that a 1.4Ghz machine K7 is faster for him than a dual 1Ghz intel. Some smarto's here at CCC can verify this easily. Note that i think that Stefan lost loads of points onto book. Like the dubious line i played against it would never have even lost 0.5 point from a strong book. He lost on book to fritz, and Stefans really only unlucky game i think was against junior, dual he might already have at least drawn the game. I'm btw amazed that fritz is faster on a dual 1Ghz intel than dual 1.2Ghz AMD. Perhaps speed and getting another ply doesn't matter that much anyway. A pc is something which is not too big and which you can carry. Duals are very cheap. A single cpu Xeon is more expensive than a dual P3. A dual AMD isn't that expensive either. I paid $3000 for my thing (1Gb registered DDR ram) but soon way cheaper dual AMDs will be there (without needing registered ecc-ddr ram and without needing probably a 460+ watts power supply with 24 pins e-atx instead of the way cheaper standard 20 pins atx). Note that this $3000 includes a LCD screen, a server case (slightly bigger as a bigtower) with wheels and it's lighter than my pentiumpro200 internet computer which weighs 40 kilo's. I'm amazed by the big protests against being dual. The only valid protest is that the allowance of multiprocessors was allowed. This amazed me too, because that would allow quads and octo processors. Now by accident a dual AMD is way faster than any quad for me, but for me a quad is definitely not in the same price league. It definitely can be in the 'carryable' league. Anyway what i would like most is that all future tournaments from ICCA are completely open hardware, the days that any supercomputer who joined would get ahead of all micro computers are over anyway. In fact i would be amazed if there are many supercomputer programs which are tactical stronger than any of the pc programs joining. I would be even more amazed if any supercomputer based program would ever win the world title (with exception from a strong PC program simply running on a supercomputer; it could run on a fast pc anyway then). The days that getting a ply deeper is going to win or lose a title for a program are definitely over. The discussions about single or dual is quite stupid IMHO. Anyone, except those who still are DOS, can run his prog dual using some cheapo algorithms and get a speedup that big that a cheap 1Ghz dual P3 is definitely faster than a single 1.4 K7. For the coming years to go it's better that all those logical protests from before this WMCC are going to put with the dirt outside and that we concentrate upon playing a good game of chess instead of complaining about those few % faster speed. For those interested in speed, just consider that nowadays programs are searching LESS deeply than the older versions of those programs would do on todays hardware. DIEP 1997 would search like 15 plies easily at todays hardware, nowadays diep searches at least 3 ply less. wcc99 i searched 20 ply in any endgame, nowadays diep version searches sometimes like 8 ply less deeply (wcc99 i ran quad xeon 400 from Bob and this tournament i searched dual 1.2Ghz AMD, that processor is like 25% faster as that katmai xeon processor was, not to mention gcc versus visual c++ diff). In diep's case i can easily answer why i search less deeply now, especially in endgame: the wcc99 version was so stupid in endgame that nearly every other position gave a fail high (score high enough to not look further), nowadays version though i consider it still stupid in endgame is way better in endgame. less relevant is the slowdown caused by egtbs. I don't need to mention that the wcc99 looked like a beginner in endgame, whereas the current version only against gandalf did a very stupid move in endgame (Re2). Even a 1600 rated could easily find mistakes in 99 version of diep's endgame. Nowadays such a 1600 would have a hard time finding mistakes. Best regards, Vincent
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