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Subject: Re: Hiarcs 10 (Aggressive Hypermodern) - Rybka Beta 9 x64 (Neutral)

Author: Vasik Rajlich

Date: 01:43:57 01/10/06

Go up one level in this thread


On January 09, 2006 at 21:41:17, Arnon Yogev wrote:

>On January 09, 2006 at 19:38:59, robert flesher wrote:
>
>>why not 64 bit providers a huge speed gain from what I have read. Even if its
>>only 30-50 elo that is alot. An extra ply here or there can spell death. I
>>prefer to see testing under fair conditions.
>
>
>I don't think that this particular type of hardware advantage can cause such a
>difference in results.
>Do you honstly think that the 32 bit version would score below 50% just because
>of it? hard to believe..
>
>For example, take a look at the latest CEGT results :
>
>Rybka 1.0 Beta 32-bit Vs. Deep Shredder 9 2CPU 512MB
>==
>104 + 50 = 25 - 29
>!
>
>The barely 80 kn/s fish slaughters the double CPU'ed kn/s monster.
>
>Hiarcs versus the same opponent scores + 16 = 15 - 19 which is pretty decent,
>but not slightly close to Rybka's result.
>
>From my personal exeperience I can tell you that while playing online for the
>first time i could pass the 2600+ rank with my antique P4 1.8 playing against
>_much_ faster machines.
>all this thanks to Rybka. before that era I could barely pass the 2450 rate with
>any other engine.. Rybka just brought back all the fun =).
>
>I don't ask Hiarcs to win every match it set against, But I think that we could
>except more from a commercial release .. Surely just to give some more
>competition. (I'm not speaking just about Rybka, so spare the "it was not
>available at the time"..)
>
>AY.
>
>PS if the setting is really better than default, Why on earth it was not
>discovered before the release ? I remember enrico said that they ran more than
>1000 long games for the beta version before the release, so I mean, none of the
>beta-testers could have just think about changing some parameters? that's their
>jobs and why they are betatesters anyway..

Enrico's explanation is pretty good. I want to add three things:

1) 60% speedup (as you get going from 32-bit Rybka to 64-bit Rybka) gives around
30 rating points. This is more-or-less consistent with previous experiments
about the topic of engine speed, and is about the most trustworthy piece of data
you will see in any of these discussions.
2) There is no way settings of a top engine can improve the level by more than
20 rating points or so. Yes, computer chess is hard, but it's not that hard.
3) There is another phenomenon with settings. Let's say you make 10 different
settings, all of the same playing strength, and now play some matches against a
different engine. You might see this:

setting A: wins 40-20
setting B: equal, ~30-30
setting C: equal, ~30-30
setting D-G: equal, ~30-30
seting H: loses, 20-40

Now, setting A becomes "the thing". It might even be a statistically significant
result - keep in mind that if you use 95% confidence, then every 20 matches, you
will get one bogus statistically significant result.

No matter how honest a programmer tries to be with himself, he will run into
this effect. Ie. you tinker, tinker, tinker - and then finally get a good
result. Of course immediately this good result makes perfect sense - it's human
psychology. I keep a very close log of all of the trustable Rybka results, and
quite often end up taking a second look at what I thought were sound
conclusions.

Vas




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