Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 19:40:48 02/17/02
Go up one level in this thread
On February 17, 2002 at 17:58:57, Jonathan Parle wrote:
>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.
Since I have started to adapt the Chess Tiger engine to the Palm (I started in
March 2000) I really feel it is an interesting exercise.
The Palm is somehow faster than a 5MHz 6502 (it has a 16MHz DragonBall in most
models), but it is still much slower than current PCs.
On the other hand I can tell you that the Chess Tiger engine has benefited a lot
from my efforts to make it run smoothly on the Palms. So the adaptation to the
Palm has helped a lot the PC version.
Christophe
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