Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 14:11:42 01/02/02
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On January 02, 2002 at 16:44:28, Kevin Strickland wrote: >On January 02, 2002 at 12:42:21, Dann Corbit wrote: > >>On January 02, 2002 at 07:58:26, José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba wrote: >>[snip] >>>It would be nice if also Tiger, Rebel and Nimzo (and some other programs) join, >>>I keep my fingers crossed. >> >>I would be very surprised if they do join, and I admire Hiarcs courage for >>joining. If Hiarcs can win on a single CPU machine, it will be amazing. >> >>Look at the commercial entrants of Deep Fritz and Deep Junior -- any single CPU >>professional program will have a 50% speed disadvantage. Chances are good they >>will end up looking foolish if they join. That is why they stay away: >>FEAR > >Remember in CCT3 that GNUChess finished well only on a PIII 800. There were dual >computers that did in fact finish lower. > >Shredder won IPCCC events with only one processor as well. I would not call it a >HUGE disadvantage to be a single processor. The more rounds you have, the less chances of a fluke win. A 50% speed penalty *should* be huge. Each doubling of the CPU count should add 50 ELO or so. A machine with 4x MHz ought to win 64% of the points against itself on slower hardware (all other things being equal). That's a pretty significant advantage. At some point, and SMP machine will be built that uses 16 or more processors effectively. That would give 76% of the points from a 200 ELO difference. If you could get an effective machine with 64 CPU's, that would give 300 ELO for 85% of the points. There were supposed to be some Alpha machines that were SMP with 64 CPU's. I am pretty sure that 32 CPU versions were built, but I don't know much about the quality of the implementations, since they used crossbar switches. Like the guy on home improvement says: "MORE POWER!" I do realize that there is a lot of variability. My assumption is that the top engines are approximately a push (within 30 ELO or so) so that a doubling of CPU power will make the doubled engine stronger. Of course, even at that there are a lot of variables. In other words, it is not a lead-pipe synch to win because you are stronger, but you ought to win. The commercial engines are already a bit stronger than the freely available engines, so they are the favorites in my view. Now, double the available CPU power, and they should have a large and clear advantage. Whether a large advantage translates into a win is another story. Consider pyotr (with an ELO of about 1400). The odds it would score 10:0 against a field of ten opponents with ELO 2400 in round robin is about: .003^10 = 0.000000000000000000000000059049 Which amounts to one in 16,935,087,808,430,286,711,036,597 trials. Not terribly likely but if you ran enough trials it would happen. And (by random fluxuation) it could possibly be the very first trial. It's just not terribly likely to happen. Now, with engines that are fairly close, there is a lot of randomness. Even at that, the very best engines are rather head-and-shoulders above the middle of the road engines and so we usually see something fairly close to what we expect.
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