Author: Uri Blass
Date: 13:01:25 10/16/03
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On October 16, 2003 at 15:25:43, Steven Edwards wrote: >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.) Crafty is not the best program of today so I see no reason to take crafty. Why not take Shredder? > >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. I think that it is dependent on the time control and the difference is going to be bigger for the new program at longer time control. Uri
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