Author: Peter Kappler
Date: 19:25:42 01/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 20, 2000 at 19:41:12, Dann Corbit wrote: >On January 20, 2000 at 12:15:33, Peter Kappler wrote: >[snip] >>I'd expect DB2 to win, but I think it would be closer than people expect. It >>certainly wouldn't blow the micros off the board. > >But we are talking about old technology verses new. > >Consider {back to the present}: >The fastest incarnations of RS/6000 do 3+ teraflops. That's 3,000 gigaflops or >3,000,000 megaflops. > >The new Hsu chips are much faster than the predecessors. > >Take a new RS/6000 ("fully loaded") and add as many Hsu/Campbell processor >systems as will fit into it. It is potentially one thousand times as powerful >as the old system. 1000 times? How did you get to this number? > Why not? Now, add in a full complement of 8 piece tablebase >files (calculated by that machine). > Huh? 8 piece? Any idea how many terabytes of disk this would require? Not to mention the months(years?) it would take to generate the tablebases. We're just now starting to see the first 6 piece tables, and I don't believe anybody has ever generated a 7-piecer. Maybe a TB expert will chime in and tell us what it would take to get to 8. >If it were their goal, IBM, Hsu and company could make a chess machine that >would crush a team of Kasparov + Old-Deep-Blue [Just conjecture, but I think >that they really could do it]. Perhaps an ELO of 3500. > What you're describing is a machine that would score ~99% against Kasparov. I think computer chess will *never* reach that level. This goes back to the old debate about what ELO rating a computer would attain if it played chess perfectly. I have always argued that this number is finite, because I believe that the drawing margin in chess is sufficiently large to allow one side to make a few mistkes and still draw against a perfect opponent. But that's a whole different discussion... :-) >A machine like that would simply be unbeatable. It could make strategic plans. >It could analyze every move that has ever been played to a depth of 20 plies and >store it in a database. Such a computing device would be invincible. I think that more speed is not the answer, because at 15+ plies, you're already faced with with seriously diminishing returns per extra ply. Any tactics that exist in the position (or that a human would ever have a prayer of finding) have long since been discovered, so the computer's positional evaluation starts to become the limiting factor. And computer chess still has a long, long way to go in that area. As you've stated yourself in other threads, the GMs are getting better at exploiting these weaknesses. --Peter
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