Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 17:52:40 06/25/98
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On June 25, 1998 at 12:15:09, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On June 25, 1998 at 08:07:53, Roberto Waldteufel wrote: > >> >>On June 25, 1998 at 06:35:40, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >> >>> >>>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 >>> >>>You see it wrong. If you do 4 ply searches without hash etc, then >>>2.5 million drops quickly to say 300k nodes a second. >>> >>>So in fact you're playing against a kind of fritz5, which DOES search >>>all leafs fullwidth, which gives you some extra tactics, so commercial against >>>programs which are only tested at the same hardware and are only >>>busy with outbooking and trying to finish the game by means of tactics, >>>you beat with big numbers then, but it will play horrible. >>> >>>Vincent >> >>Hi Vincent, >> >>I'm not sure I understand - can you explain what yo mean. I do use hash tables - >>would not the Chip have access to my system's RAM? And When you say it would >>play horribly, why so? how could the chip make it play any worse than without >>the chip? >> >>Best wishes, >> >>Roberto > > >you have to ignore part of what vincent writes, because he is an "anti-deepblue" >person from way back. A couple of key points: > >1. no a chess processor could not see your RAM. But they do have their own >hash table memory. > >2. a PC program with one of these chips attached would be far and away stronger >than any existing computer chess program running on a PC. A chess board that >they used had 8 processors n it. A PC could use the same approach, and search >at about 20 million nodes per second. > >I pointed out to Vincent last week here that he was not doing well playing >against Crafty. He pointed out (factually, by the way) that Crafty has a >hardware advantage with the 4 processor ALR. But he's going to have to take >a stand on one side of the fence or the other. Either speed is important, and >his note about me having faster hardware does explain why crafty wins most of >the games played on ICC, or speed is not important and doesn't explain crafty's >win/lose ratio vs the various DiepX programs on ICC. > >I believe in a combination of speed and intelligent. DB has that. A PC-card >with one or more DB processors would *still* have that. And it would produce >unheard-of performance figures for a PC-based chess program. Ala' Deep Blue >Junior, which is basically a PC with a chess board (actually an IBM single-cpu >workstation with a VME-bus chess card, so don't start hoping to buy one of those >and plug it into your PCI bus. :) > >Bob You have to ignore most of what Bob writes about Deep Blue, as he is a known pro-deep-blue authority. As i pointed out a 'smart' program like deep blue can never do much knowledge within 10 clocks. This means that total depth of everything is 10 clocks. Also first Bob wrote that Deep Blue had 1000 adjustable parameters. As i pointed out 1000 adjustable parameters are hardly more than piece square tables (already taking 12*64=768 adjustable parameters). So when smoke about knowledge has been removed, we can go to the supposed speed of it. Then it appears that from the few printouts i saw of Deep Blue, that it just searched 11 or 12 ply. That's not much for a 200 million nodes a second program. Now when we consider that it has MASSES of disadvantages a normal chessprogram has at a general purpose processor, not to confuse with single chips, then we see after some calculations that those processors indeed are fast, but their practical speed compared to PC programs is a lot less. Still more than PC programs of nowadays, so no doubt it'll kick some butt in blitz, but i doubt whether normal users who likes to see some positional insight of a program as well will ever be happy with it. Further i like to point at the fact that the technology used for DB chessprocessors is very cheap. The salary of the PR people who were needed to organize the event needed probably eated up the biggest part of all that money, which IBM claims that the event Deep Blue-Kasparov took. Greetings, Vincent
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