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

Author: José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba

Date: 05:14:07 07/10/02

Go up one level in this thread


On July 10, 2002 at 00:47:06, Peter Kappler wrote:

>On July 09, 2002 at 19:42:37, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>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.
>>
>
>Yes, please re-tell.
>
>
>>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".
>>
>
>Nor did he claim to.
>
>I can't see this happening (weaker play with 200x speedup) unless you have a
>major bug like a sign error in a large positional term like passed-pawn scoring
>or king safety.  But that's far beyond what I would consider a "badly-tuned"
>eval.
>
>Actually, forget that, I think the entire eval would have to be backwards for
>that much extra speed to weaken you.  I'd gladly invert just my king safety for
>a 200x speedup.  ;)
>
>-Peter

Deeper searches help even if the eval (material and positional) is reversed, the
only requirement is to give mate-scores correctly.
José.



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