Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 19:34:16 10/16/03
Go up one level in this thread
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. I only remember the cyber 176 (AKA CDC 7600) in Dallas in 1976. They did about 2300 nodes per second (2.3K). It was good enough to beat a few GM players at blitz (GM Stean was one, Ivanov was another). > >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.) The 6400 was way old, by the middle 70's the 6600 and the BIG 7600/cyber 176 was CDC's state-of-the-art. I think that was perhaps the first machine that ran chess 4.0 although they might have used a 6600 in 75, I am not sure.. It would not be a real fair test and I'd expect Crafty to win easily. No null-move at the time, at least not in the form we use it today. Extensions were pretty common in today's form (in check, pawn pushes, etc.) However, adding null-move to chess 4.x would certainly make things "interesting" although clearly today's programs have far better endgame skills, at least comparing mine to 1976 programs. > >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". It also doesn't really include the words "computer chess" either. :)
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