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Subject: Re: HW based Crafty

Author: Slater Wold

Date: 18:12:30 03/30/02

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On March 30, 2002 at 18:45:40, Keith Evans wrote:

>If you don't already have a copy of Hsu's thesis and IEEE micro articles, then
>you should get copies of those. You won't find the Belle articles very
>enlightening as they don't get into enough detail - just get copies of Hsu's
>papers.

Of course I do.  ;)

>Then when you're designing your move generator think about how an on-chip
>microsequencer might want to interface to the move generator. And think about
>how both would interface with some on-board evaluation hardware. Your PCI
>interface could be a target only interface that's used to communicate to the
>microsequencer.
>
>You'll probably find that using a ChipTest (move gen only) type approach just
>slows Crafty down, but don't let that discourage you because you'll need a move
>generator if you decide to make a more complete chess coprocessor later. IMHO
>the next step for you would be to put a Deep Thought style design onto an FPGA
>and maybe add transposition tables to that if your development board supports
>external memory. Hsu never did glue on any transposition tables. Does anybody
>know why not? Is there more to it than simply running out of time?

I read an article where some college students made a FPGA based Chess Program,
and they could not get a memory and/or TT to work.  Also, where would you store
the nodes from 200M nps x 3 minutes?

>I think that if you start reading about all of the the features in final Deep
>Blue chip then you might get a little overwhelmed. And it's a little mystifying
>because some of the features are not well documented. I don't think that it
>would be impossible to implement all of the features into one of the larger
>Virtex parts, just keep in mind that Hsu spent a decade thinking about this
>stuff so it will take a while. (You didn't propose doing this, but you might
>eventually start thinking about it.)

The chips in Deep Thought took 6 months to design and produce.  The chips in
Deeper Blue took > 3 years.  This is just a start for me.  Putting an eval and a
search into a chip is *not* something I am interested in doing at this time, but
KNOW I will seriously consider doing after my initial goals are met.

There are FPGA's out there that could handle everything that a DB chip did, but
uh, they are quite expensive.  Perhaps when I get to that stage, they will have
come down a bit, and it will be more feasible.

>Regards,
>Keith



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