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Subject: Re: Multi-threading issues

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 21:18:17 11/08/02

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On November 08, 2002 at 18:44:59, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

>On November 08, 2002 at 17:05:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>>That's a peanut time investment compared to a full SMP algorithm like
>>>Crafty, Sjeng, not to mention what DIEP uses.
>>>
>>>Crafty and DIEP needed years to bugfix,
>>
>>Don't know where you have been, but the parallel search in Crafty took two weeks
>>to write.  It may well _still_ have a bug or two that I haven't seen show up, of
>>course.
>
>I'm tempted to say, the time to write it is irrelevant, it's the time to get
>it working well that matters. Debugging and testing a parallel search takes
>'quite' a bit more time than writing one.
>
>In fact, the above is true for almost everything in programming.
>
>--
>GCP


I consider both one and the same.  I was given a "loaner" dual PII/300 and
exactly two weeks later Crafty was playing on ICC using both processors.  The
two weeks included writing the code, testing it, and running it on ICC.  It
wasn't fully "unleashed" (the two processors always worked together in the
first version) but it was fully implemented and the stuff was working.

Of course, I have a "bit" of experience in parallel programming, so I won't say
that the average programmer with zero experience will do it that quickly.  My
first parallel search played chess in 1978 on a Univac 1100/42 in the Washington
ACM computer chess tournament, for a time-frame reference.



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