Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 12:26:16 06/09/03
Go up one level in this thread
On June 09, 2003 at 13:20:47, steven blincoe wrote:
>On June 09, 2003 at 04:57:05, stuart taylor wrote:
>
>> People not involved in chess sometimes look upon a great Palm chess program as
>>being one of the lowliest little gadgets anyone could think of, and certainly a
>>most obvious one. But the greatest of handheld programs (soon to be Christophes
>>upcoming Palm program maximised for about 400Mhz (Arm).Is probably far far
>>greater in all its aspects than all the great famous old computers of the 1970's
>>and perhaps of some from the 1980's.
>
>far greater in only ONE aspect..playing strength.. and even that only because of
>the faster computing power of toady's computers over the technology of the 70's
>and 80's
You are dead wrong.
From the latest SSDF list:
137 Chess Tiger 14.9 Palm m515 16MB 42MHz 2101 69 -74 100 39% 2180
184 Chess Genius 1.5 Palm m515 16MB 42MHz 1870 69 -78 100 32% 2002
185 Mephisto Roma 68000 12 MHz 1869 18 -18 1519 56% 1827
The last two lines show that a Palm m515 running at 42MHz has approximately the
same processing power as a 68000 running at 12MHz because ChessGenius 1.5 for
Palm has the Mephisto Roma chess engine, source is the Chess Genius web site.
So on the same hardware a modern program (Chess Tiger 14.9a for PalmOS) gets a
rating 230 points above a program from 1987 (ChessGenius for Palm, aka Mephisto
Roma).
So clearly a modern program using the same hardware as 15 years ago is MUCH
STRONGER than a program from 15 years ago.
Today's programs do not need more computing power in order to be much stronger
than those of the '70 and '80.
Where have you been since 1987?
>playing strenght aside, the dedicated computers of the 70's and 80's destroy the
>palm in terms of features,wooden board,wooden pieces and even the literature
>built up over the years
Yeah, sure:
* saving thousands of games in memory. Can you do that with your wooden unit?
* Importing/Exporting PGN games. Can you do that with the wooden board?
* Updating the program when a stronger one is released. Can you do that?
* Customizing the colors. Can you do that? ;-)
I fail to see why the "literature built up over the years" destroy a Palm
program in term of features, sorry...
>i even suspect that many if not most of the programs written in the late 80's
>would probably be stronger then today's Palm units if they were placed in
>computers running at 400 MHz and an ARM processor rather then at 16 Mhz on a
>68000 processor
You are completely wrong, again.
When the speed increases, programs of the late '80 get worse when compared to
today's programs.
This is due to them having a worse branching factor that today's programs.
If you want to check this, I suggest you study the behaviour of Chess Genius for
PC from the slower to the fastest PCs.
>for my money ..i would rather own ONE Mephisto Bavaria with a 1988 Almeria 32
>bit world champion module ,then EVERY Palm or PC chess program ever written!
>
>(with the singular exception of the King program of course)
If you are not very strong at chess that might be a good choice...
137 Chess Tiger 14.9 Palm m515 16MB 42MHz 2101 69 -74 100 39% 2180
162 Mephisto Almeria 68020 12 MHz 1972 42 -40 305 62% 1885
(please note that the hardware of the Mephisto Almeria 32 is several times
faster than the hardware of the Palm quoted above)
Finally I know what you wanted to say. You probably wanted to say that the old
dedicated chess computers still have some kind of magic attached to them, and
that one can feel some affection for them.
And I agree with you.
But please do not pretend that they are technically on par with modern chess
programs running on handheld computers (Palms). They are definitely not. They
are much weaker and Palm programs have simply more features, are simpler to use
and I have no doubt that many people are more attached to their Palms than to
their PCs or their old dedicated chess machines.
Christophe
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