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Subject: Re: Hydra Mystery Remains Unsolved

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 13:14:03 02/17/04

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On February 17, 2004 at 15:59:48, Bob Durrett wrote:
[snip]
>The way it is with true beginners is that for every answer they think of ten
>more questions.  Smarter people are smart enough to not show their ignorance,
>whereas the beginners, like me, don't have anything to lose.  : )
>
>I guess by now you have figured out that I have another question!  : )
>
>It seems to me that there should be some way to provide a "cost" benefit for a
>hardware feature, with the benefit measured in nps.
>
>For example, a "move generator chip" should be worth X nps.
>
>As another example, consider a "position evaluator chip."  It is worth Y nps.
>
>This can go on for all the important functions performed in a chess engine.
>
>Would you care to estimate [guess at] the nps value of such chips?
>
>In this application, it would seem that a few well-designed chips might go a
>long way!

NPS as a measure of chess strength is useless.

I can make an evaluation that just counts the material on the board and does one
million NPS.

A 200K NPS smart evaluation will clobberize it.

Forget NPS as a measure of chess strength.  The only usefulness of NPS is to
measure a chess program against itself.  People don't even have the same meaning
for the term from program to program.

So if I run a program on hardware X and get 500K NPS and I run the same program
on hardware Y and get 1500 NPS, then I know that the program runs 3x as fast on
hardware Y.  That is all.  I don't know anything about how strong it is in
relation to another program or even if it will play a lot better.

I only know how much faster it runs, relative to itself.



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