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Subject: Re: Question about DB hardware

Author: David Blackman

Date: 18:06:51 11/09/98

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On November 09, 1998 at 20:01:50, jonathan Baxter wrote:

>These famous "chess chips" of DB: did they do a full-blown alpha-beta search
>or did they just do static eval? Seems to me if they just do static eval
>then a plug-in card based on them for a PC is going to have a huge bottleneck
>just getting the positions into the chips.
>
>Jon

They did 3 to 4 plies of alpha-beta (without null-move, and with a quiescence
search) and then a static eval at the leaves. The chips don't have a
transposition table but do have some sort of mechanism for detecting
repetitions. Eval weights can be uploaded to the chip from the host. It's not
clear to me if search parameters can also be uploaded.

Given that each CPU of the SP is slower for this kind of thing than a modern PC,
and the SP ran 16 chess chips per CPU, i think a PC could run quite a few chess
chips flat out, if they were on a well built PCI card.



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