Author: Jonathan Parle
Date: 14:58:57 02/17/02
Go up one level in this thread
On February 17, 2002 at 05:31:40, Uri Blass wrote: >On February 16, 2002 at 19:52:27, Jonathan Parle wrote: > >>On February 15, 2002 at 23:25:23, Lyn Harper wrote: >> >>> I've got a Novag Expert, dating back to 1985. A faithful old friend >>> of mine. >>> I just now did a little calculation based on the theory about a 70 >>> elo point increase in playing strength for every doubling of clock speed. >>> If I could get the program out of my Novag Expert and put it on a >>> floppy disk, it would play at about 2680, right up there with the best >>> of them. Does this mean there have been no improvements in chess >>> programming in the lasst 17 years? >>> I suggest the theory is flawed. The truth is that it works for a >>> few doublings, then there is a diminishing return. >> >>It is a very interesting question, but one that is very hard to answer. >>Unfortunately Mhz is a horses for courses thing, with there being different >>processor types. Lyn's Novag Expert, for example, ran on a 6502 processor. Not >>comparable in clock speed to any PC processor since the 386. And then you have >>RISC chips, 68000 chips, the 6301Y, Pentiums, Athlons, etc...the list goes on >>and on. Unfortunately the shear number of hardware combinations and totally >>different methods of programming make this a question that will always be >>theorectical. One program might respond "according to theory" by being >>underclocked and another might totally debunk any theory. Certainly if you could >>take the program out of a 17 year old dedicated machine and run it somehow on an >>Athlon 1900XP, you would see an enormous increase in playing strength, but I >>think it would still be noticeably weaker than other recent programs. Back in >>the 80's programs were written with one combination of very specific hardware in >>mind, and consequently they were highly optimised as such. They were actually >>very efficient, with ELO ratings of over 1900 being achieved on tiny 5Mhz >>machines with only 32K programs. The PC revolution brought with it significant >>changes to the way programs could be written. For starters there was much >>greater processor scaling potential, the ability to incoporate massive opening >>libraries, large amounts of memory for hash tables (that dedicated machines >>could only dream about) and the ability to easily and routinely modify reference >>files used by the program (OK some dedicated machines could do this in a >>reltively primitive fashion but it was the exception rather than the rule). >>Today, if you told a programmer they were writing a program for a single, very >>specific PC, and that PC only, chances are the program would be a little >>stronger on that PC than a generic program - due to the ability to fine tune the >>code and the search algorythms. I also believe the reverse also applies. That >>is, if you could take a first class program of today like Junior or Rebel and >>somehow port it to run on a 5 Mhz 6502 machine, I believe it would lose a match >>to a dedicated machine such as Mephisto Polgar. > >I do not know about Junior or Rebel but >I believe that it is not truth for tiger. > >palm tiger and chesstiger14.7 are based on the same engine and has the same >evaluations and search rules if you give it the same hash tables. > >I believe that humans learned a lot about chess programs in the last 15 years. >I believe that if you tell top programmers today to write a program for 5 mhz >machine they can write a program that is more than 100 elo better than mephisto >polgar. > >Uri It would make a very interesting exercise to say the least.
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