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Subject: Re: Crafty Stats

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 13:47:57 04/14/04

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On April 14, 2004 at 13:44:54, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On April 14, 2004 at 10:38:52, martin fierz wrote:
>
>>but you can't say that it's a coincidence! SSDF tests what 99% of all users
>>have. and that IMO is the right thing to do. a commercial programmer simply
>>can't emphasize multiprocessing to a big extent, because the time spent on that
>>is "wasted" in a commercial sense.
>
>How then do you explain:
>
>deep fritz
>deep shredder
>deep junior
>deep sjeng
>
>for starters.  There are more SMP commercial engines than there are non-SMP
>commercial engines...

I am not so sure about that.  Are there any commercial SMP engines except
those you mention above?  I could easily mention much more than four
commercial engines which do not yet have SMP support.

And even though several commercial SMP engines exist, I doubt that their
authors have spent anywhere near as much effort on parallel code as you
have done.  How well do you think they scale beyond 2 or 4 processors?

>Also care to make a bet about +5 years from now as to whether your statement
>will be true?  AMD and Intel will only be selling chips with 2 (or 4) cpus on
>the single chip by then.  Intel is _almost_ doing it now with SMT.  AMD has
>already announced their intent that the next CPU will have two processor cores
>on a single chip.
>
>All the non-SMP guys will then be struggling to catch up...
>
>Those that look ahead architecturally will already "be there".

But everybody don't have the same goals and interests for the future as
you.  To me, chess programming on desktop computers is beggining to get
less interesting already today, because those computers are already so
damn fast.  It is no longer a very difficult task to create a PC program
which beats 99.99% of all chess players.  Further improvement has mainly
academic interest, except for a tiny group of elite players.

I consider it a much more interesting challenge to make an engine that
plays well even on small handheld computers and mobile phones.  Not only
is it more difficult to make a good engine with limited memory and a slow
processor, handheld devices are also a much more pleasant platform for
playing chess.

Tord



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