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Subject: Re: fine, last word

Author: Roy Eassa

Date: 12:32:23 08/28/01

Go up one level in this thread


On August 28, 2001 at 13:22:46, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On August 28, 2001 at 09:57:30, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>Suppose I have a hardware engine that is based on Crafty.  I need a bitmap of
>>the occupied squares, but I want it rotated 90 degrees so that ranks become
>>files and files become ranks.  I can simply pass the original bitmap thru a
>>set of gates that will shuffle the bits as needed and compute the rotation in
>>less than one hardware cycle.  Pretty easy to visualize that, I hope.  But now
>>I want to do this in software.  How are you going to do this?  With 64 ANDS to
>>isolate each source bit, 64 shifts to shift them to their pre-assigned
>>destination in the rotated bitmap, then 64 ORS to merge them together?  While
>>my hardware solution took zero time?
>
>I will not reply to every part of your most recent posts. I've already spent way
>too much time writing these posts and can't afford much more.
>
>This seems to be the crux of the matter--your belief that CB is somehow remotely
>similar to DB and the similarity qualifies you to make bad guesses about DB.
>This is a joke. Yes, CB was written on a Cray, using special Cray/vector
>instructions. But these instructions are still simple, sequential, and EASILY
>translated to any other general purpose processor (maybe not with terrific
>performance, but it's still easy). CB on a PC is a "port" because it's the exact
>same program, just running awkwardly.
>
>In contrast, DB is NOTHING like CB. There's no stream of simple, sequential
>instructions at all. I don't know how you would even begin to pretend to "port"
>DB to a PC, especially using the chip blueprints as you descriped in your other
>post. For example, the DB chip has a pipeline. How do you want to implement that
>in software? Run a thread for each stage and needlessly duplicate huge amounts
>of information between the threads to simulate latching the pipeline registers?
>Do you want to "port" or "emulate" the cascaded adders by doing all sorts of
>unnecessary, intermediate addition? The idea is stupid, stupid, stupid. That
>anyone would think of it makes me queasy. Or that anyone would think that this
>is in some way similar to porting software from general-purpose CPU A to
>general-purpose CPU B.
>
>I don't see what your problem is with simply reimplementing DB's evaluation
>terms. It's not hard. They do king attack stuff? I've written code to find all
>the attacks to/near the kings in half an hour. I'm absolutely certain I can
>implement what you're doing for potentially open files in half an hour, too.
>I've spent a lot of time coding up eval terms from different sources (GNU Chess,
>HIARCS, etc.) and none of them have ever given me any real programming trouble.
>I'm not sure what your hangup is with DB's terms.
>
>It's convienent that Netscape cut out on you right when you were about to reply
>to my 5,000 nodes question. According to the estimates you're standing by, a DB
>node would take as long as 5,000 "normal" PC program nodes. Do you honestly
>believe that their evaluation is _five thousand_ times more sophisticated than,
>say, Crafty's? Because I sure don't. I might accept "twice as sophisticated as
>MChess's" or something reasonable, but what you're saying is simply absurd.
>
>So, that was the last word in this conversation, unless you feel the need to go
>back on your word and continue it, which you usually do.
>
>-Tom


I used to naively believe that highly intelligent people could disagree on a
technical topic without becoming nasty.  Sigh.




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