Author: Uri Blass
Date: 21:46:41 02/17/02
Go up one level in this thread
On February 17, 2002 at 22:40:48, Christophe Theron wrote: >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 I do not see why do you need the palm for it. I think that it is possible to tune the engine for very fast time control on a pc. When you know the number of nodes per seconds you can use number of nodes as your clock because the real clock is not sensitive to times like 1/10000 seconds. I think that tuning the program for the palm is more work than it (for example I guess that you need to use 16 bit numbers instead of 32 bit numbers) Uri
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