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Subject: Re: Q&A with Feng-Hsiung Hsu

Author: James Swafford

Date: 11:40:12 10/13/02

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On October 13, 2002 at 14:25:00, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On October 13, 2002 at 12:00:39, Andrew Williams wrote:
>
>It was answerred another 2 times that it's 12 ply simply,
>excluding qsearch+extensions. So the hardware is inside that
>12 ply, but the hardware depth FROM that 12 ply can be UP to
>6 ply. So it isn't always searching 6 ply in hardware. It's
>a variable depth which they can do in hardware. That explains
>probably extensions around mainlines with captures very well
>and do not forget that the chips could do up to 1 billion nodes
>a second in theory.

Ok, if you say that was answered, I believe you, but that
doesn't sound like what the quote I responded to in a thread below
meant.  Can you provide the transcript for this?  Seriously,
I would very much like to see it.



>
>It searched on average over a period of 3 minutes only 126 MLN
>nodes from that. that's only 10% effective usage or so each
>chip. That means that there are *always* loads of chips idling.
>
>So getting extra processors to the PV is a very clever thing to
>do then. Of course you give the chips a small search depth then.
>2 to 3 ply is what Brutus was using at world champs 2002. Bigger
>search depths in hardware were too inefficient.
>
>You cannot use killermoves in hardware and you cannot use hashtables
>and Hsu didn't use nullmove either. With his last so many plies pruning
>(whatever name you want to give it, razoring, futility pruning) that means
>that when searching the Principal variation, you have to give many processors
>small search depths, because the pruning around principal variation is
>a lot less than for the other moves.
>
>It would be interesting to hear in a next chat how many plies the forward
>pruning was in the hardware part. Here just doing 1 or 2 ply didn't
>reduce anything. Yet i remember some statement from a talk at M$ from
>Hsu recently where (was it Tom kerrigan) asked Hsu about forward pruning
>in the hardware chips and he answerred he was doing that.
>
>So what type of pruning he did there is not so interesting. Interesting is
>that it saved them up to 90% nodes in hardware. That's very clever, because
>chrilly concluded that without forward pruning in hardware, your tree gets
>just TOO huge (because move ordering is near random).
>
>Chrilly uses nullmove. If Deep Blue used something else there. Only
>interesting thing from my viewpoint therefore is to know how many plies
>they did this forward pruning in hardware.
>
>My own experiments are not relevant here too much, because i use hashtable
>and nullmove everywhere. So it is very well possible that without nullmove
>the effect of forward pruning is way bigger than without.
>
>>Several people asked:
>>
>>Question: What does "12(6)" mean in Deep Blue's logs?
>>
>>Dr Hsu said, "12(6) means 12 plies of brute force (not counting the search
>>extensions & quiescence). 6 means the maximum hardware search depth allowed.
>>this means that the PV could be up to 6 plies deeper before quiescence."
>>
>>Unfortunately questions were being fed through a third-party, so it wasn't
>>possible to get a follow-up.
>>
>>Andrew



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