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Subject: Re: the fastest chess engine still available free!

Author: Danniel Corbit

Date: 11:34:39 10/01/98

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On September 30, 1998 at 15:20:52, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On September 30, 1998 at 14:12:22, Alessio Iacovoni wrote:
[snip]
>>Maybe I haven't expressed myself correctly... of course a program developed in
>>1998 is stronger than one dating back to 1990, or even closer in time. What I
>>meant to say is that we will reach a point, if we havent already, in which chess
>>programs, instilled with that chess knowlwedge that they were lacking in the
>>past, will not require anything else for improvement than sheer processing
>>speed. What programs in the bast were basically lacking was a better positional
>>understanding.. now they have that (see HIARCS and basically all of the other
>>ones.. including the so called "fast searchers" such as Crafty), plus they have
>>an outstanding  tactical capacity. So.. HOW ELSE can they be improved by
>>software? What I meant was that we have probably come at a point in which
>>"everything has already been done" and now the baton has to pass on to hardware
>>improvements...
>>I don't know if there have been any studies of this kind but could a progam like
>>Hiarcs.. or any of the strong ones that everybody has at home.. beat kasparov at
>>long times with a pentium XX "1000" or something of the sort and 100mb of mem
>>for hash tables?
>>
>>Alessio Iacovoni
>
>I would tend to disagree.  Until a program plays "perfect chess", programmers
>will find holes in its play and continue to fix them.  I haven't slowed down,
>for example, in adding things to my evaluation, nor changing them as I watch how
>they behave.  There is a *long* way to go before reaching this point, IMHO...
It has been touched on elsewhere [in another thread] but programs have to be
rewritten, or *at least* recompiled to take advantage of the new architectures.
Try running a program from 1984 compiled for an 8088 on a new machine compared
with one tailored to the new architectures and you will see enormous
differences.  I think, in order for computer programs to really be on a par with
the great human players, the software area is equally important to hardware.
This is simply because it takes a lot of pure computing power to overcome a
problem which is ~O(n^28).  If we can find a way to make the problem smaller,
that will make an enormous difference.



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