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Subject: Re: Is Hardware Over -valued? Why is Diep doing so Poorly?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 16:42:37 07/09/02

Go up one level in this thread


On July 09, 2002 at 17:41:09, Uri Blass wrote:

>On July 09, 2002 at 15:25:17, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>I agree about the other problems but 2 is not a serious problem.


First question, have you _ever_ done this?  I have.  And I have been burned
by it.

Second question, did you ever see my comments about how we almost lost (or
didn't win) the 1986 WCCC event due to this _very_ problem?  If not, I can
re-tell the story again.

Believe me it _is_ a problem.  From someone who developed a chess engine on
a machine running 100 nodes per second, and then played on a machine
searching 1000 times faster.  It can be a _serious_ problem.

>
>Every program that I know is going to play better if you give it 10 hours per
>move and not 3 minutes per move.
>
>Uri

Sorry, but you don't know "every program".



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