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Subject: Re: interesting idea

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 06:50:17 09/07/02

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On September 07, 2002 at 06:28:52, Rolf Tueschen wrote:
>
>Actually I was "defending" you against Sune. He advised you to consider the
>number of the digits, talking about measurement. From the internet files...
>What I was trying to say was that the speedup is a ratio and no measurement.

Yes you _can_ convert from km/hr to miles/hr without losing digits, but
somewhere along the line there _has_ to be a measurement.
Whereever that is, that is where you should be careful.
Measuring nodes doesn't give a true picture of speedup, only an upper bound (as
mentioned). Time is the only relevant parameter AFAICS, and you _will_ have a
certain amount of uncertainty there, mostly because two runs doesn't produce the
same tree, but also because timing simply isn't easy to do accurately. Every
time I bench my program using clock() I get fluctuations within two percent,
don't understand why, it's all determanistic, but it is a fact none the less.
(this is perhaps not a big issue with a good timer?).

Say I kick a football 53 meters, that would be good measurement.
You don't need to know if it was 53.37634 or 53.24453 meters, 53 m is accurate
enough, because next time I'm probably not going to kick it 53 m, perhaps it
will be 57 m or 48 m depending on the wind conditions and how I kick the ball.
Same thing with parallel search since the tree changes from run to run.

We could make the rule that only the best possible case is of interest, like in
the olympics. Then you can run the test 100 times and get lucky to get a speedup
of 2.0, so you have an algorithm that is theoreticly capable of doing a 2.0
speedup?
I'm sure you can see why that is nonsense, only the average is of interest, IMO.

>And
>that depending of the positions (chess) this ratio would vary. So, here I give a
>first point to Vincent. To do exact research we must analyse how far chess does
>influence the speedup! I think that we could still continue the debate. Or is
>your paper already history and the actual problems are different ones? I had a
>different impression when reading V.  First: Are you sure that 24 different
>positions would lead you to the same speed-ups?

I am sure that they don't :)

-S.

>What, if certain positions allow
>a gain for particular ncpu? Questions over questions.
>
>Rolf Tueschen



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