Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 12:25:17 07/09/02
Go up one level in this thread
On July 09, 2002 at 13:30:55, Marc van Hal wrote: >On July 09, 2002 at 02:36:22, Uri Blass wrote: > >>On July 09, 2002 at 01:34:04, John Reynolds wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> If I understand correctly, Diep is using a Supercomputer, shouldn't it be doing >>>much better in this tournament, or is it to early to Judge? I mean the Computer >>>World Championship ofcourse. >> >>You did not understand correctly >> >>see http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?238965 >> >>I also read that in another post that the prices for one hour of the super >>computer are very high so I guess that people need to be rich in order to use >>the super computer. >> >>I guess that in order to use the super computer you need a lot of hours of >>testing in the super computer to see that things work and if you need to pay >>some hundreds of dollars for an hour then it is something that most programmers >>cannot even consider and I talk only about 60 cpu's because the prices for 1024 >>cpu's are even higher. >> >>Uri > > >In fact I saw the statements of the WCCC and I ad once was thinking some >programs will perform worse if they are just installed on a computer >Leading to false results >All program with learning have trouble with this only one more then the other. >I don't know the reason of this but I do know this from expierince. >But in fact it is like a Tournament player who prepared his games and when he >has to play the tournament he has to forget everthing he prepared. > >Marc van Hal There are several issues: 1. using unusual hardware is non-trivial. NUMA machines are one example. 2. Going faster may well cause your eval to misbehave as it is very easy to tune an evaluation to a specific search depth and going much deeper or shallower can cause some of that tuning to be wrong. 3. testing (or lack thereof) leads to bugs. This was the main reason I finally gave up on Crays. They are very fast, but getting enough time to test to produce a robust code is difficult at best, and impossible in reality. 4. Unexpected bugs can happen with compilers that have not seen something you are doing that is unusual. Bitmaps on a 32 bit machine for example. Early versions of GCC simply blew up when they produced executable code that was simply wrong for Crafty. Supercomputers are less likely to have been used by every Tom Dick and Harry and have likely not been exposed to every possible programming glitch people can produce...
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