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Subject: Re: Hydra stats on Playchess.

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 11:02:01 02/17/04

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On February 17, 2004 at 13:48:16, Mark Young wrote:

>Hydra
>8 x 2.8 Xeon & 8 FPGA Cards
>
>Total games 47
>Stored results 47
>White 24
>Wins 19
>Draws 16
>Losses 12
>
>Results 27/47 = 57.4%
>Opponents Elo 2604
>N Opponents 31
>
>Rating 2634
>
>I see nothing in the results or games to suggest at this time. That Hydra is the
>end all, be all future of computer chess.
>
>The last game I saw Hydra playing Shredder 8 on a P600 and down a pawn when
>Hydra logged off. TC was 15 10.
>
>Dispite the hype... Hydra is not exactly blowing the top PC programs out of the
>water even on much slower hardware. If the results are correct on playchess.com
>for Hydra.

You have to learn that hyperbole follows any new project.  It is fast, and it
plays pretty well.  But it isn't _that_ good.  IE It is not the second-coming of
deep blue or some such nonsense.  I did a few runs on an 8-way opteron two weeks
ago and saw speeds that were around 16-17M nodes per second.  Hydra's speed can
already be reached by existing hardware, and without the issues of no hash in
hardware, its speeds can be beaten with existing machines.

IE the last version of Belle was first seen in 1980.  By 1983 Cray Blitz was
out-searching it.  And we continued to get faster every year while Belle was
stuck at the hardware speed it was built around.

DB's 200M nodes per second average was incredible in 1997.  I've searched 10% of
that speed already and there are boxes around that will go maybe 4x faster than
that.  So today, it is possible to search about 1/2 as fast as deep blue, but
with their hardware non-hashing problem, we might be faster today.

Time marches on, hardware designs tend to be "flash in the pan" things,
brilliant today, not so fast tomorrow, slow next year...




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