Author: derrick gatewood
Date: 23:19:47 02/08/01
Distributed computing has been a very exciting field, especially in the past few years. One night while playing my computer account on chess.net(Catcher_in_the_Rye) I was closing down my SETI program so that my computer wouldnt totally slow down, then I had an idea. Wouldnt it be exciting/great if we could apply the same ideas as SETI and RC5..whatever.. in the area of computer chess. Now, I am aware there are certain problems that are involved with dirstributed computing. One, chess relies on the results of previous searches to begin further searches. This makes this solution less than ideal. However, I was thinking along the lines of the primary computer doing an initial search to say even 5 or 6 ply, then have it send data units to the other computers assigning them a certain area of the search tree that it would like them to complete. Once they are done with their part of the tree, they can then send the unit back in the form of a rated result.. the primary computer can then store the result in its tables and if time permits it could send the secondary computers even more packets for processing. Now, this is where the second problem in distribuuted computing comes into play, bandwidth. There would be a lot of information being sent back in forth and it would be needed in a timely manner. This would make most dial-up users not be able to participate because it would bog down their connection and force the primary computer to slow down and wait to receive the slow packet. But... Lets say that a person has a server farm of about 15-20 computers all wired with 100mbp/s lan.. This would make it even more viable? Or would it? This is just an idea, and I would like to hear what the real computer scientists have to say about it. I am only a networking guy and know little about actual programming, although I have tried to write my own chess program from scratch only to get bored of mediocre results. Thanks in advance for all replies.
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