Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 18:33:32 01/06/02
Go up one level in this thread
On January 06, 2002 at 21:17:43, Bas Hamstra wrote: >...because the fastest hardware simply wins. You can invent all kind of >ingenious tricks, but it's nothing compared to faster hardware. On 2x faster >hardware Tao just crushed GT 3x in a row and won the latest 10 15/0 games at >FICS against strong opponents on slower hardware. Come on, the only fair way to >compete is on equal hardware. I don't want to buy a computer twice a year just >for CC tournaments, that's ridiculous. IMO the competition would be much more >satisfying on equal hardware. Factor 2 hardware difference means hard to win for >any program against a not too bad opponent. Anything above that makes the >chances *way* too small to be fair. Yet that is quite normal in tournaments and >you won't hear anyone about it. Program X played this AMAZING knight sac >againtst program Y!! Hardware differences seem to be simply ignored. And that's >crazy, in fact. I think there can be many factors for chess contests. You can have open hardware, or fixed hardware. On open hardware, you can equalize the time. It depends on what you are trying to determine. For instance, do you want to know what the strongest combination of hardware + software is? OK, now let's think of equal platform. Joe writes a program for the Mac. Sam writes a program for Linux on Mips Sally writes a program for OS/2 Jill writes a program for Alpha on NT Larry writes a program for Win32 on Intel Fred writes a program specially optimized to use AMD's registers "Just say everyone must use Windows" simply disallows the Mac programs (which are popular) and even the Linux programs. Similarly for everyone must use the same hardware. So that any decision you make necessarily will hurt *someone* in whether they can perform or not, or at least infringe upon their ability to perform. I think (however) that equal hardware events can be very interesting. You could use the results of the SPEC benchmarks to normalize for any tested machines, and then give time slices which allow for the differences. I don't know of any communication protocol which allows that sort of time control yet, but it should not be impossible to create it. You can (of course) manually step through a move at a time (like the KKUP and KKUP2 contests) but that would be far too tedious for normal game speeds.
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.