Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 13:49:13 02/17/04
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On February 17, 2004 at 16:14:03, Dann Corbit wrote: >On February 17, 2004 at 15:59:48, Bob Durrett wrote: >[snip] >>The way it is with true beginners is that for every answer they think of ten >>more questions. Smarter people are smart enough to not show their ignorance, >>whereas the beginners, like me, don't have anything to lose. : ) >> >>I guess by now you have figured out that I have another question! : ) >> >>It seems to me that there should be some way to provide a "cost" benefit for a >>hardware feature, with the benefit measured in nps. >> >>For example, a "move generator chip" should be worth X nps. >> >>As another example, consider a "position evaluator chip." It is worth Y nps. >> >>This can go on for all the important functions performed in a chess engine. >> >>Would you care to estimate [guess at] the nps value of such chips? >> >>In this application, it would seem that a few well-designed chips might go a >>long way! > >NPS as a measure of chess strength is useless. > >I can make an evaluation that just counts the material on the board and does one >million NPS. > >A 200K NPS smart evaluation will clobberize it. > >Forget NPS as a measure of chess strength. The only usefulness of NPS is to >measure a chess program against itself. People don't even have the same meaning >for the term from program to program. > >So if I run a program on hardware X and get 500K NPS and I run the same program >on hardware Y and get 1500 NPS, then I know that the program runs 3x as fast on >hardware Y. That is all. I don't know anything about how strong it is in >relation to another program or even if it will play a lot better. > >I only know how much faster it runs, relative to itself. That suggests that we need to identify a more useful measure of performance. Once a useful measure is found, it remains to evaluate value of various candidate improvements and express that value in terms of the chosen measures. So maybe a better approach would be to identify the most time-consuming processes in a conventional chess engine and then "hardware-ize" those processes. Somehow, the expected benefits would have to be expressed numerically before committing to the time, effort, and money required. How to measure this? I hope we are not falling back to SSDF! Bob D.
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