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Subject: Re: How good to use a LAN for chess computing?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:34:27 09/15/01

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On September 15, 2001 at 03:28:18, Tony Werten wrote:

>On September 14, 2001 at 22:56:06, Pham Minh Tri wrote:
>
>>I see that dual computers are expensive, not easy to own and still limited in
>>power of computing.
>>
>>I wonder how good / possible if we use all computers in a LAN for chess
>>computing. LANs are very popular and the numbers of computers could be hundreds.
>>Even though a LAN is not effective as a dual circuit, but the bigger number of
>>processors could help and break the limit.
>>
>>What do you think?
>
>When you search a chesstree, a lot of times you come into parts of tree that you
>have searched before. You either don't want to search this part again ( you have
>searched it deep enough before ) or you want to have the best move from the
>previous search. Hashtables do exactly this.
>
>In a LAN (or a cluster) you don't share this hashtable and therefor are
>searching the same tree (or parts of it ) time and time again. If you count the
>number of nodes searched per second it's a linear speedup but effectively it's
>useless. You have to add a lot of computers before you get any real speedup,
>specially in the endgame.
>
>cheers,
>
>Tony


This is not necessarily true.  Several programs have distributed the hash table
across network nodes.  It requires small changes to the basic search algorithm,
but a distributed hash table is not only doable, it has been done more than
once.

I will probably do this in the distributed Crafty when I do it...



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