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Subject: Re: HW based Crafty

Author: Jeremiah Penery

Date: 06:49:10 03/30/02

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On March 30, 2002 at 03:07:29, Slater Wold wrote:

>Dan Corbit once called Crafty the "N-Reactor of Chess Engines".  If this is
>true, I might be creating the worlds largest N-Reactor Chess Program.
>
>
>In the coming months, I will be working with a few people to create a hardware
>based move generator for Crafty.  I myself have written my own chess program
>over the last few years, however find it inadequate for this project, mostly
>because it's too simple.  (Man, I am a glutton.)  A 10M nps (basic) alpha/beta
>search will prove nothing, while a "tried and true" engine like Crafty will
>truly show the power of nodes.  How does a 2M nps Crafty compare with a 10M nps
>Crafty?  Well, that's my question!
>
>The hardware will consist of a single FPGA on a PCI card that will be inserted
>into the host computer.  The FPGA will be used for move ordering (and returning
>those moves in a predefined order) and generating all legal moves and passing
>them back to the software.

Similarly to what Sune already said, just doing the move generator in hardware
will do nothing for Crafty in terms of speed.  If you could do the evaluation in
hardware, that would really be something.

On my machine (AthlonXP 1900+), Crafty already generates around 27m moves/sec,
and does generate/make/unmake about 7m times/sec.  With the normal Crafty
evaluation, I get probably 900k NPS or so.  IMO, it's fairly obvious that the
evaluation takes way more time than anything else in Crafty.



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