Author: Tom Likens
Date: 09:46:36 11/14/03
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On November 14, 2003 at 12:26:53, martin fierz wrote: >we all know computer chess has evolved a lot over the last years. the top >programs are now battling (and beating) the very best players on the planet. >mainly through consistency, but sometimes also with non-materialistic moves that >computers would IMO not have made a few years ago (...Bxh2! by junior against >kasparov, ...OO! giving up the exchange by fritz yesterday). > >question: is this progress more due to hardware or more due to software >advancements? > >or in other words: if you took a top program of today (e.g. the current >fritz/shredder/junior) and ran it on 5-year old hardware against a 5-year old >fritz/shredder/junior version on today's hardware: which combination would win? > >cheers > martin I believe the advances in hardware have allowed the programs to evaluate things they wouldn't have attempted years ago, because of the resultant reduction in search depth (the kiss of death). A quick example, a fair number of programs used to be largely piece-table driven (i.e. they performed a large amount of evaluation at the root and used those results at the tip of the search tree). While this is still a component of all the top programs, most have been moving in the direction of more accurate full- leaf evaluation because the hardware is fast enough to support it without sacrificing too much depth. So to answer your question more precisely, the advances are mainly software advances enabled by faster hardware (IMHO). regards, --tom
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