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Subject: Re: LCT II Fin4, Deep Thought, and Deep Blue (was Re: LCT II results...)

Author: Jay Scott

Date: 15:35:32 01/06/98

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On January 06, 1998 at 17:30:40, Don Dailey wrote:
>In
>every way (except raw speed) the Deep Blue team is handicapped so you
>can not expect them to compete with the highly tuned micro programs.

This is not true. The hardware has one big advantage besides
outrageous speed: it's parallel at the transistor level. You can
get more evaluation function terms at each node by adding
transistors, and adding transistors does not slow you down.

So a hardware chess machine has a different speed/knowledge
tradeoff than a software chess program. Adding knowledge is
cheap, at least until you use up your real estate, so it makes
sense to add as much knowledge as you can. In software, adding
knowledge almost always slows you down, so you have to be
more careful. With as many devices as you can get on a chip
nowadays, I imagine that its natural for chess hardware to have
far more evaluation terms than software can afford.

>So does Deep Blue suck?   In rating points per node searched, YES.

Well, what about rating points per log nodes searched?

I don't think we have enough information to judge how well
the Deep Blue team did in exploiting their potential advantage
in knowledge. Their development time was relatively short, as
these things go, so perhaps not well. But on the other hand
they had plenty of talent, and they're perfectly capable of
coming up with good new ideas.

This IBM web page <http://www.av.ibm.com/2-2/CoverStory/>
says that "some of Deep Blue's weights" were experimentally
tuned by machine learning. DB is not a conventional program.

  Jay



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