Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 09:03:11 06/25/98
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On June 25, 1998 at 04:54:02, Roberto Waldteufel wrote: > >Here's another question about Hsu's chess chip. I seem to recall reading some >time ago that Hsu was considering a commercial release of his chip. Does anyone >know anything more about this? If the chip were to become available, how could I >use it in conjunction with a PC? would the fixed depth not be "out of sync" for >the speed of, eg a Pentium 333Mhz if it was designed to work with a >supercomputer, or can the fixed depth be adjusted to redo the balancing act in >the new environment? If it were possible, I would be very interested in >experimenting with this sort of hardware coupling. I assume that it would extend >the depth to which a program could search by something like 4 extra plies within >the same time. This would surely improve the strength of the PC ches programs >quite a lot! > >Roberto there really isn't a "fixed depth". This is a parameter you set in the chess processor when you fire it up. You simply tell it to search to a depth of your choosing, although this depth has to be closely matched to the speed of the host machine as I mentioned in the past. Since the chess processor has a fixed clock speed of 2.4M nodes per second, you have to choose how deep it searches to balance that speed against the host machine that has to provide it positions to search. Set the depth too high and the host will waste time waiting on the chess processor. Set the depth too low, and the host will have to search an extra ply deeper to be able to provide the chess hardware positions quickly enough to keep it busy. If you study this, what you find is an interesting phenomonon. If you tell the chess processor to search 1 ply deeper, then the host processor has to search one ply shallower, or it will provide positions faster than the chess processor can search them and return the results. If you tell the chess processor to search one ply shallower, then the host processor has to search one ply deeper to provide it positions to search fast enough. In short, for a given host, there is a very definite max depth you can search. You can do more in the hardware, or more in the software. Software is generally better as you can change the search, tweak with the extensions, without changing the chess processors at all... Hope that explains what they are doing...
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