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Subject: Re: good MP idea?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 17:28:10 07/30/98

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On July 30, 1998 at 17:17:05, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>Memory isn't fast enough to divide up processors by function (e.g., move
>generation, etc.). It wouldn't make the program any faster.
>
>Cheers,
>Tom

actually it is.  In fact, this is how "hitech" works... one processor
per chess board square in fact.  And others have played with generating
moves in parallel, evaluating in parallel, etc.  Where it breaks down is
once you pass 4 or 8 processors.  IE generating moves with 512 processors
would be problematic since there are *never* 512 moves to generate, for
example.  Scalability becomes a serious drawback when you try what is
commonly called "horizontal multiprocessing" (assuming the tree is a
vertical entity, horizontal means dividing a single node up into pieces,
rather than splitting the tree into "vertical slices" and searching each
part in parallal as I do).

 On July 30, 1998 at 16:39:00, Danniel Corbit wrote:
>
>>On July 30, 1998 at 14:46:46, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>>
>>>I was just thinking, what if a chess engine was contained in a C++ class?
>>>It would have a function that starts a little loop that waits for work. When it
>>>gets work, it starts searching.
>>>To use it, you make a thread out of this function.
>>>Then, when you want to write an MP program, you make several copies of this
>>>class and several threads running the respective loops.
>>>The threads, being contained in the classes, don't bother each other, except to
>>>request work.
>>>Comments? Suggestions?
>>I think it is a very good idea, but I might scale it down a bit.  For instance,
>>make the class be a move generator.  Make another class that is a position
>>evaluator.  The hardest part will be to write the coordinator so that no work is
>>duplicated and so that resultsare properly synchronized.



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