Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 12:42:35 08/12/04
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On August 12, 2004 at 15:07:51, Sune Fischer wrote: >I know what you mean of course, but speed really is a factor in computer chess. >It's not the most important factor, but not something to be ignored either. >I'm not sure I see the point of writing an engine in a slow language, why >handicap yourself from the beginning? >Do you not want to write the best engine you can? Here is something to think about. You start writing a chess program in C or C++. I start writing a chess program in C#. I have mine up and running three times faster than you do. Let's say it takes me one month (just for discussion) to get my engine playing legal chess. That means that by the time you have your program playing legal chess (just legal chess, not good chess), I will have been working on search and evaluation for two months. Let's say your program runs two to four times as fast as mine. Now we continue developing for another month or two, and we have a match between our programs. After six months of development, which program do you think will win the match? I think it would either be close, or the C# engine would be the favorite. Okay, what about two years after we started? Five years? Ten years? Does the rule of getting three times more work done still apply then? I think at some point it will have diminishing returns and the slower C programmer will catch up and then have an advantage in execution speed. But maybe I am wrong about that. In the short term, at least, the C# programmer will have a very big advantage and the C/C++ programmer will be struggling to play catch up. Think of it another way. If Shredder was two to four times slower, it would still be a huge favorite against almost any of the hundreds of engines out there. You could count on one hand the number of engines that would have a significant advantage over it. Fritz, Junior, and maybe a couple of others. So I think speed is overrated unless you are at the top where things are already very close. Then it can become a more significant factor, such as going from #3 in the world to #1. Basically what this tells me is that there are a lot of other factors that are more important than speed. At some point, when you have taken care of a lot of the other important factors, improving the speed will give a significant boost. In other words, making Crafty go four times faster will mean more than making TSCP go four times faster. There are a lot of other things that would benfit TSCP more than faster execution.
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