Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 22:47:53 06/01/01
Go up one level in this thread
On May 31, 2001 at 15:40:30, Georg Langrath wrote:
>
>>
>>>If it is 100 points stronger it is still not strong enough, the LCD chess model
>>>takes about 1 hour of thinking time to play Qe7 in this position:
>>>
>>[D] rnbqkb1r/ppp2ppp/3p4/8/4n3/5N2/PPPPQPPP/RNB1KB1R b KQkq - 0 1
>>>
>>>1200?? hard to say, it does play some decent moves.
>>>
>>>The new thing might as well have an Athlon in it. Does anyone know what kind of
>>>chip was in the old one?
>
>Excalibur should have money enough to buy a better program. Why choose such a
>lousy program? Of course the hardware is very slow, but nevertheless I think
>that e.g. Insomniac had made much better even on this slow hardware. And I think
>that many amateur programmers would be proud to sell their program to Excalibur.
>Excalibur could afford it.
I think you have no idea of what slow means.
In the PC world, I guess that slow means 200MHz or slower by nowadays standards.
In the world of dedicated computers, slow means something like 1MHz, with a
processor that needs ten times more cycles to complete a single operation that a
Pentium.
Such a computer is at least 2000 times slower than your slow PC, so imagine what
an amateur PC program could do on the slow stuff.
Maybe it could not even finish its first ply of search in 3 minutes.
>Of course this chess program shall be suitable also for amateurs, but that
>should also be possible on lower levels. You don't have to call them handicap
>levels. Nobody think it is fun to play on a handicap level because of the word
>handicap. You only have to make floating levels from beginner and up.
>
>Or is it so that the hardware is so slow that also the best amateur engines
>would be that bad? Perhaps also the Excalibur LCD program had been good on a
>modern PC?
>
>Anybody that can tell me? This is a mystery for me.
An amateur program has absolutely NO chance on such a slow hardware.
I read in another post that the LCD unit has a 6MHz processor, which changes
almost nothing to the situation.
It takes a real good programmer to achieve even a novice playing strength on
such a computer.
Not even talking about memory constraints. Probably 16Kb for the program
(including opening book) and 1Kb for the data, that's almost mission impossible
for an amateur programmer (I mean in a decent time).
Christophe
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