Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 12:25:43 10/16/03
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On October 16, 2003 at 09:20:20, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On October 16, 2003 at 09:06:17, swaminathan natarajan wrote: >>about 900 n/s > >It had better be faster. IE a single xeon runs over 1M nodes >per second. How far we have come! I seem to recall Slate and Atkin reporting that their program Chess 4.5 ranged between 250 and 600 Hz on a CDC 6400 (roughly equivalent to an Intel 33 HMz 80386+80387), and this was enough to give some humans a decent challenge (back in the mid 1970s) along with winning the world CC championship. Processing speed has increased by a factor of forty or so in the past three decades. Are the programs/platfrom combinations of 2003 much more than forty times "better" than that of 1973? How much of the "better" ratio is due to improvements in algorithms? More specifically, if one were to take Crafty or a similar program that has the NWU Chess 4.x as a great grand uncle and run it on a 33 HMz 80386+80387 class machine, how would it fare against Chess 4.x running on a true clock speed emulation of CDC 6400 hardware? (The last real CDC 6400 was powered off long ago, perhaps in the mid 1980s if I remember correctly.) I assume that the more modern program would win most of the time, but it wouldn't be that much of a performance mismatch. If today's programs on today's hardware are 1000 Elo stronger than the 1973 CC champ, how much of that is due to better algorithms vs better hardware? I'll take a guess and say that thirty years of advances in software is responsible for no more than 200 Elo improvement and perhaps only 150 Elo points. And most of the software improvement is due to only a few new ideas: 1. PVS/zero width search 2. Null move subtree reduction 3. History move ordering heuristics 4. Tablebase access during search 5. Automated tuning of evaluation coefficients Computer chess was supposed to be the Drosephilia of AI. If so, CC theory is still in the larval stage and I don't see wing buds popping out any time soon. Where are the CC planning engines? Where are any general pattern recognition algorithms in use? What program has real machine learning? Which programs are adaptive and can re-write better versions of themselves? How many programs can converse in natural language and answer the simplest of questions as to why a particular move was made? Where are the programs that can improve based on taking advice vs coding patches to the Evaluate() function? And the big question: What has CC done for AI in the past thirty years, and what can it do for AI in the next thirty years? Hint: Any remotely correct answer does not include the phrase "nodes per second".
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