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Subject: Re: HW based Crafty

Author: Slater Wold

Date: 12:25:17 03/30/02

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On March 30, 2002 at 09:49:10, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>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.

That is simply wrong.  Movegen accounts for about 1/2 of most programs.  And
doing evals in HW takes a HUGE ($300,000 FPGA) chip and a LOT of work.  Can I
borrow $300,000?  ;)

>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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