Author: Ian Osgood
Date: 15:03:47 07/13/98
The organization Distributed.Net is currently using thousands of clients, running on ordinary PC's, to exhaustively check RC-64 and DES-II keys to decode a message and win a contest. There is also interest in using the same methodology to create a widely distributed parallel chess engine. However, I think that this is not likely to work. The search time would be dominated by the network lag. The more the search is parallelized, the more lag would enter into the overall search time, and the less benefit you would obtain from standard alpha-beta search techniques. Since the clients would be widely distributed, you would also have throw away the global transposition table. The only previous work I can recall that sounds similar is Schaeffers work with Pheonix. However that was using a small number of computers connected on an Ethernet LAN. Does anyone else know of other work along these lines? Any other opinions on using large numbers of loosely coupled computers as a strategy for parallelizing chess search? The organizer of the distributed chess engine effort is Remy de Ruysscher (remy@cyberservices.com). He is the author of the program Shannon, which has played in the Dutch Computer Championships. A list of other possible projects is at http://www.distributed.net/projects.html Ian Osgood iano@teleport.com
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