Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 16:55:45 08/25/01
Go up one level in this thread
On August 25, 2001 at 19:06:08, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >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. You missed out on this one: Tao Single Pentium III 700 MHz But you did play a 866 MHz machine: [Event "18th WMCC"] [Site "6th Olympiad Maastricht"] [Date "2001.08.22"] [Round "7"] [White "Diep, 2x AMD 1.2"] [Black "XiniX, Intel 866"] [Result "1-0"] [ECO "E37"] [PlyCount "107"] [EventDate "2001.??.??"] [Source "Frank Quisinsky"] 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. Qc2 d5 5. a3 Bxc3+ 6. Qxc3 Ne4 7. Qc2 c6 8. e3 f5 9. Nf3 Nd7 10. Be2 O-O 11. O-O Rf6 12. b4 a5 13. b5 cxb5 14. c5 Qc7 15. Bxb5 Rh6 16. h3 g5 17. Bxd7 Bxd7 18. Ne5 Rh4 19. Rb1 Bc6 20. f3 Nf6 21. e4 f4 22. Re1 dxe4 23. fxe4 Nd7 24. Nf3 Rh5 25. Qc4 Nf8 26. Bd2 a4 27. Bc3 Rd8 28. Ne5 Rh4 29. Kf2 f3 30. gxf3 Rxh3 31. Rh1 Rxh1 32. Rxh1 Be8 33. Bd2 b5 34. Qc3 Nd7 35. Bxg5 Rc8 36. Bf4 Nxe5 37. Bxe5 Qb7 38. Qe3 Bg6 39. Qg5 Qf7 40. Rh4 Re8 41. Rf4 Qe7 42. Rf6 Qg7 43. c6 Bf7 44. Qh4 h5 45. Qf4 Bg6 46. c7 Rc8 47. Rxe6 Rxc7 48. Bxg7 Rxg7 49. Qh6 b4 50. Rc6 Be8 51. Rc8 Kf7 52. Rc7+ Bd7 53. Rxd7+ Kg8 54. Qxg7# 1-0 The records here: http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/olympiad/ report: Xinix Single Pentium III 866 MHz, 256 Mb >Secondly, everyone who can make a chessprogram can make his program parallel >without much effort. How long did it take you? If someone has never done SMP programming it is not a trivial thing. >Third, some people, including stefan meyer kahlen, will find out that their >program is single cpu faster than dual. This is not surprising. I suspect it will take a year to get SMP extremely well implemented. It depends, of course, on how many global variables there are that are written to and how many static variables that are written to as well. >If SMK was wrong here then it was a political decision to go for the >single title. It was obviously a good idea because it succeeded. >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. Maybe he knew he had a much better chance to get an official title and not even have to worry about Junior or Fritz (or Ferret or Crafty or Diep). In fact, I think his choice was brilliant. Of course, there was Chess Tiger, but in the end, he will get to write: "Three times consecutive computer chess world champion" on his software box. Can anyone really believe that he made a mistake? I think the multiple CPU championship was probably a LESS PRESTIGIOUS victory. I am talkiing about an advertizing standpoint. If I see that a program won a contest with more than one CPU and my machine only has one CPU, I might very well decide to try the product that wins with only one CPU. Since that is 99.99% of the market, which segment would you target? All in all, I think SMK out-thought everyone except Christophe. >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. Points lost or no points lost, he still won the single CPU world championship. The bottom line is all that matters. >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. I have seen a similar effect for some programs. For instance, Eugene Nalimov's build of Crafty seems faster on a 900 MHz Intel box than on my 950 MHz AMD. The builds I make are not like that, but it seems to depend on a lot of factors. >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. I agree that duals are a very smart buy. But most people won't do it for some strange reason. The next computer I buy out of pocket will have more than one CPU (almost for sure). >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. If a dual is a problem, then a faster CPU is a problem. After all, it's the same defect -- the one with the fastest machine gets free ELO. If you are 4 times faster, you just got +100 ELO at least. A 2400 IM verses a 2500 GM in a contest -- who will come out on top? You could think of it as making the slower programs play at knights odds. Ouch. In particular, XiniX was at a HUGE disadvantage. The bigger cache and more advanced chips of the faster machines makes the dropoff much larger than the MHz difference. >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. I find this very strange. Do you even mean a 900 MHz quad? That would be pretty bizarre. >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. Will you still feel that way if 8 CPU Siemens 2GHz machines show up, giving an effective throughput of 8*2*.75 = 12 GHz, and you are still at 2GHz? They have a factor of 6 speed increase, which would be several hundred ELO. Imagine a 10 Gigabyte hash table that can be read in a flash. Imagine 7 men tablebase files on 15K RPM drives with lots of ram to cache them (maybe 100 GB ram for cacheing tablebase files). Will you compete effectively? Is it still a PC when it costs $100K? >In fact i would be amazed if there are many supercomputer programs which >are tactical stronger than any of the pc programs joining. For many of the PC programs, it is as simple as a recompile. Supercomputers are IO machines. You could access the tablebase files with basically no penalty. That is where the biggest advantage lies, I think. >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 CPU horsepower difference is not enormous. But if you have a huge volume of data, a supercomputer would be a very large advantage. >The days that getting a ply deeper is going to win or lose a title for >a program are definitely over. I don't think they were ever there in the first place. With a short event with less than 20 matches, it's a crap shoot. But every advantage you can find should surely be used if you want to win. >The discussions about single or dual is quite stupid IMHO. It seems to annoy the participants, and since I am a non-participant, I shouldn't really have any say. But I think a discussion of fairness is always a good idea. >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. A single SMP bug could make your program lose. >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. If the conditions are clear, then the contestants should not fuss about it. It would be nice if the host university could provide strong hardware for the participants who cannot afford it. >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. If the same algorithms could be pushed back to 15 plies, would you see no improvement? If you put your program on the 8 CPU monster system I mentioned, would you see no change? Don't forget that by the next WMCCC there are going to be Itanium machines for sure. I believe that Intel has bought some Compaq technology, so we might see 64 way Itanium boxes. If that comes to pass, I predict an everlasting butt blasting for someone who shows up on 700 MHz. >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). Maybe you should change the name to "shallow" '-) >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. How will a computer do searching for them? That seems to be the question that matters for these contests.
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