Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 18:32:03 02/18/04
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On February 18, 2004 at 21:14:33, Dann Corbit wrote: >On February 18, 2004 at 12:07:16, Bob Durrett wrote: >[snip] >>I am reminded of the Fidelity Challenger discussed here recently. If the >>Fidelity guys had known then what is known today, their machine would have been >>much stronger. I suspect that we have not seen the last of dedicated >>chess-playing machines. You can do only so much on a general purpose sequential >>machine like a PC. Hydra is sort-of a half and half since it is hardware but, >>like a parasite, it still seems to need a PC [or equivalent] as a host. > >The Fidelity chess machines used general purpose CPUs (not custom hardware). > >Either the 6502 for the early ones or 68000 for the later models. > >If they had used custom hardware, nobody could have bought one. Or it would >have been very weak. That was quite a while ago. Sounds good to me. Of course, the Fidelity box was a bit smaller than a modern PC. Icidentally, I have been doing some more thinking! : ) Either you, Dann, or Bob Hyatt said something about whether or not a particular block of code might be well suited to "hardware-izing." The idea is that certain blocks of code could be easily "hardware-ized" and other blocks of code would be hard to "hardware-ize." Perhaps the better approach would be to break up the chess engine into functions, and measure percentage of microprocessor time used for each function. There would, surely, be many ways to decompose the overall "chess engine function" into a set of sub-functions, and perhaps some innovativeness would help to make sure most of the small functions were well suited to "hardware-izing." Those that were not would require that the engine designer select alternatives to get around the difficulties. All this might take some effort. Your idea of working mainly on eliminating "bottlenecks" seems a good idea too. I still see the potential for enormous gains in engine strength, at least hypothetically. The proof would be in "the pudding," of course. Only when the hardware were built and tested would the performance gain be measured and understood. Hydra may, indeed, be just a "flash in the pan," but you must admit that Hydra winning Paderborne should have raised a few eyebrows. Someone would have to be really insensitive to not be at least a bit pulsed.
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