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Subject: Re: APHID , advances in ICCA #8

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 08:50:40 09/18/01

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On September 18, 2001 at 11:31:00, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On September 18, 2001 at 09:10:02, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On September 17, 2001 at 12:00:45, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:
>>
>>Hello now that i saw this link and downloaded the source i
>>realized this was also published in advances in ICCA volume 8,
>>of course i got this book and first removed some dust from it,
>>after which i opened it and saw at page 71 claimed next
>>by M. Brockington and J. Schaeffer
>>
>>"... Although most parallel alfabeta-programs take months to develop,
>>the game-independant library allows users to integrate parallellism
>>into their application with only a few hours of work"
>>
>>[cough]
>>
>>Well if no one here manages to do that, who am i to say that the
>>remainder of this algorithm is worth trying?
>>
>>For sure there is a speedup problem.
>>
>>But there is more. It's a complete different algorithm than YBW.
>>
>>Which means that APHID already says who has to search what before relevance
>>of parallel splitting has been indicated. Considering that nowadays we
>>use nullmove bigtime, this makes APHID completely outdated, because
>>it in short doesn't wait at all!
>
>
>You need to _read_ the article first.  That version of Crafty used null-move
>R=2, recursively.  Changing to R=2-3 would be a trivial change.

Bob the speedups claimed are for serach depth from 5 ply to 8 ply MAXIMUM.

Based entirely upon a program called

>
>>
>>First few pages it says that a major problem with YBW is the idle time.
>>
>>This refers to the fact that YBW for each node needs a result for the
>>first move first before splitting other moves. Now this is of course very
>>true, but this directly also shows that APHIDs branching factor is by
>>definition bigger than algorithms which use YBW.

>this is incorrect.  Cray Blitz didn't use YBW either.  It tried to do that
>whenever possible, but it _never_ waited, _ever_.  It would choose to split

I'm doing that partly too, but i directly resplit if possible then, so i see
DIEP like a program which splitting strategy is completely YBW dominated.

Did you resplit in Cray Blitz when possible?

>_somewhere_ rather than sitting idle, taking a chance that the parallel work
>done was needed.

>>Back in 1996 for example TheTurk which used APHID searched 2500 nodes
>>a second. I don't need to mention that for nowadays networks capable
>>of searching millions of nodes a second, that branching factor is a bigger
>>problem than it used to be in 1997.
>>
>>Note that Deep Blue used seemingly a similar approach to APHID, which
>>considering its search depth was no problem to use of course.
>
>
>
>Deep Blue's search was not related to the APHID approach in any fashion.  Their
>search was completely different for obvious hardware reasons.

The explanation given by Hsu in IEEE99 is pretty similar to the story
the APHID guys give...

>
>>
>>>On September 17, 2001 at 11:54:35, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>>On September 17, 2001 at 07:10:46, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:
>>>>
>>>>Well show me the code and i can run it here at my 100mbit
>>>>network then!
>>>
>>>ftp://ftp.cs.ualberta.ca/pub/games/aphid
>>>
>>>APHID libs, crafty version for them
>>>
>>>You need PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine, standard message-passing
>>>lib), and probably a quick look at some of their docs how
>>>to set up the config files.
>>>
>>>You can get the papers/thesis and all from
>>>
>>>http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/aphid/index.html
>>>
>>>--
>>>GCP



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