Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 07:41:45 08/29/01
Go up one level in this thread
If you _really_ believe that DF/DJ are better than DB of 1997, you are
going to somehow have to overcome the following problems with that stand:
1. We _know_ that DT played at a 2650+ level. Here is an excerpt from an
email sent to me by Hsu:
This is in the book draft that you have. The best 25-game performance was over
2655. The USCF rating was much lower, because the first 20 games in DT's
career, which include the disasters in early phase of the US OPen, had four
times the weighting of the last 35 or so games in DT's career. This is
so because DT's first official rating after 20 games was well over 2400,
and the subsequent games therefore had only 1/4 weight. This is somewhat
illogical, but DT was an unusual case to begin with. If all the games had
the same weighting, then DT's USCF rating would have been over 2600, even with
the disasters included.
--FH
So the 1992 (roughly) version of the program, made using 3 micron ASICS,
was at _least_ as strong as either deep fritz or deep junior on today's
hardware. I will be conservative and say they are "equal".
We know that in 1992 they were running at around 1M-2M nodes per second,
which is roughly what DF/DJ will do on an 8-way box. We also know their
actual results against a bunch of GM players in multiple tournaments and
matches hit a best of 2655 over _25_ consecutive games (not 25 cherry-picked
games).
2. The final DB machine was based on .6 micron ASICS. That is, each chip
contains 25X as many logic circuits as the original 3.0 micron processors (if
you reduce the width and length by 5, area is decreased by 25. So the final
DB2 chips had 25X as many circuits. And we also know that 2/3 of the final
chip was in evaluation. And being generous, 50% of the first chip was eval
since he said "it is now up to 2/3 of the total chip area" which suggests that
DT's chip was not nearly as sophisticated in the evaluation.
Now let's do the math. The new DB2 chip has about 50X as much evaluation
circuitry as did deep thought. The new DB2 machine was over 200X faster than
deep thought. The original deep thought was at _least_ as strong as today's
best programs.
Conclusion: If DB 2 had 50X as much "smarts", plus was 200 times faster, do
you _really_ conclude that DB2 is weaker than Frita or Junior? _really_? There
is no way the math will support such a statement.
A 200X faster DT would have been quite strong (that was basically what DB1 was
all about in fact, more speed, but not a lot more smarts). A 200X faster, and
a 50X smarter program sure seems, at least to me, to be significantly beyond
anything running today on PC hardware or even on supercomputers.
How do you counter those arguments, each of which is technically accurate and
given by Hsu's publications or email that I have supplied.
To say that DF/DJ is stronger is absolutely nonsensical... with nothing to
support such a conclusion whatsoever...
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