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Subject: Re: Crafty and Alpha processors

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 09:59:43 01/19/01

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On January 19, 2001 at 09:35:25, David Wilke wrote:

>It has been stated by Robert many times that Crafty is blazing fast on an Alpha
>processor.
>
>If this is the case, why wouldn't he use Alphas to run Crafty on the chess
>servers instead of the big gun Xeons?
>
>What would be the actual cost of a Quad processor Alpha machine?
>
>And how much faster would Crafty be on that hardware?
>
>Also, it was stated if Robert cleaned up the Crafty code, it could become as
>much as 2x faster. How much would that improve it's elo?

if you double its speed, yes it would be stronger.  Computer chess legend says
that doubling -> 70 Elo improvement.  Whether that is true or not is something
else...


>
>If it would make it faster, why not do it?


It would greatly hurt the ability to modify the code, or to even understand
what it does.  Cray Blitz would be a classic example of something that is nearly
unreadable and _very_ difficult to modify because of this.


>
>Also would a manually made book be better for Crafty?

definitely...  but it is a real pain to do...




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