Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 07:30:15 08/16/01
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On August 16, 2001 at 08:00:51, John Alfred wrote: >On August 15, 2001 at 23:38:11, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On August 14, 2001 at 13:01:13, Roy Eassa wrote: >> >>>On August 14, 2001 at 07:40:47, John Alfred wrote: >>> >>>>Do you know of any attempts by anyone at a chess coprocessor daughterboard? >>>>(apart from anything to do with Deep Blue) >>>> >>> >>>There was a device called "The Chess Machine" that was sold as an ISA card for >>>the PC. You ran a special app and this card "took over", essentially replacing >>>your main CPU for the duration of your chess play/study. It had a nice >>>mouse-based GUI and loads of features, and played quite well for its time (back >>>in the DOS days). Its claim to fame was that it could turn a slow PC (e.g., >>>PC-XT) into a strong chess program, and it lived up to that. As PC CPUs got >>>faster, the Chess Machine lost its market and got quite cheap. >>> > >>>I'm sure that's not exactly what you asked, but I wonder if somebody could pull >>>the same (or similar -- true coprocessor?) trick off today, in a world with 1.5+ >>>GHz main CPUs. >> >> >>There used to be a guy on ICC running a program named "big blue" I think. It >>was a 1978 version of Blitz (prior to Cray Blitz, and yes, I distributed source >>back then too...) He was a graphics card designer and was using a graphics >>card designed for SGI to run Blitz on in hardware. It was pretty fast (probably >>10x faster than Crafty at that particular hardware time) but the 1978 program >>was really pretty out-dated (no null-move, etc). But it was very strong and >>gave many programs a lot of trouble, mine included, just because of the speed. >>(Blitz was not "dumb" but it wasn't near today's programs in strength, of >>course). But with that speed advantage, it was very dangerous. >> >>He disappeared a long while back and I haven't heard from him since. But it >>was pretty amazing the first time I noticed him playing Crafty and seeing his >>finger notes mention "Hyatt, Blitz, and 1978". :) > >Hi Bob, Thanks for the info. Has the effect of 'Null-move' been quantified on >change of a program's performance in terms of Elo rating? >Excuse my lack of knowledge, but what is ICC? >Thanks in advance - John I haven't tried that null vs no-null test in a long while. It is easy to do in crafty since "sel 0 0" will turn null move off totally. It would be easy to play null-on vs null-off to see how the match ends up. ICC is the Internet Chess Club, a place to play chess online with over 5,000 members and a _bunch_ of grandmasters playing there all the time.
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