Author: Bas Hamstra
Date: 02:56:55 01/07/02
Go up one level in this thread
>I think there can be many factors for chess contests. You can have open >hardware, or fixed hardware. On open hardware, you can equalize the time. > >It depends on what you are trying to determine. For instance, do you want to >know what the strongest combination of hardware + software is? In fact when I think about it, I can't see the point of this. IMO if you would ask all programmers what they think is more important a) the competition aspect or b) determining what is the strongest "chess entity" 99% would vote for a. >OK, now let's think of equal platform. > >Joe writes a program for the Mac. >Sam writes a program for Linux on Mips >Sally writes a program for OS/2 >Jill writes a program for Alpha on NT >Larry writes a program for Win32 on Intel >Fred writes a program specially optimized to use AMD's registers > >"Just say everyone must use Windows" simply disallows the Mac programs (which >are popular) and even the Linux programs. Similarly for everyone must use the >same hardware. So that any decision you make necessarily will hurt *someone* >in whether they can perform or not, or at least infringe upon their ability to >perform. I have seen these arguments, but they absolutely don't convince me. This kind of hurting is *nothing* compared to the hurting that is currently going on, where someone on a P3-700 has to compete with a fast quad machine in a tournament. >I think (however) that equal hardware events can be very interesting. You >could use the results of the SPEC benchmarks to normalize for any tested >machines, and then give time slices which allow for the differences. >I don't know of any communication protocol which allows that sort of time >control yet, but it should not be impossible to create it. You can (of course) >manually step through a move at a time (like the KKUP and KKUP2 contests) but >that would be far too tedious for normal game speeds. Possible, but complicated. A good compromise is IMO what they do in Paderborn: the organization aranges all hardware, and you can for instance chose P3-700 single or P3-700 double for your program. Nothing is perfect, but pretty fair I would say! For tournaments in which we have to bring our own hardware we are in a vicious circle. Since everybody is bringing the fastest hardware on the market, I have to too. Why not end that, and set a speed limit. Everybody can arrange an old laptop, very convenient, and we could compete in fairness forever. Best regards, Bas.
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