Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 00:02:05 05/19/04
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On May 19, 2004 at 00:29:42, Joshua Shriver wrote: >Are there any kind of hardware limitations in computer competitions? > >If not, I'd imagine people would just bring a small custom cluster. > >TSCP would beat Hiarcs or Shredder if tscp was parallelized and Hiarcs was on a >486. I'm not sure that is a given. Alpha-beta based programs don't scale well on clusters. A smaller number of processors that scales decently is probably just as good or better than a cluster. >Just an idea; perhaps there should be some kind of limitation. >If not then you're not really testing the strength of the engines, but a >combination of code and hardware. In that case, whoever has the most money has a >huge advantage. Especially if clustering is allowed. That is the goal of the WCCC, to have a competition between the best computerized chess playing entities, not to test which software is the best. How do you limit computer chess playing entities like Hydra, Deep Blue, etc.? What about the new chips from AMD that will have multilpe cores? How would you propose to run an event where hardware isn't a factor? Maybe the tournament organizers could provide everyone with equal hardware... "But I have spent years working on multiprocessor search and you only provide a single processor machine. That's not fair!" Okay, so provide everyone with dual machines... "But I have spent years working on my single processor program, so these guys who support multiple processors have an unfair advantage!" "My program scales up to four processors, but you only provide dual machines. That's not fair!" If we provide Intel machines... "But my program runs better on AMD machines! That's not fair!" If we provide 32-bit machines... "But my program is a bitboard program and runs better on 64-bit machines. That's not fair!" If we provide any hardware at all... "But my program runs on specialized dedicated chess processors like Deep Blue!" If we provide hardware with Windows installed... "But my program only runs in Linux!" You get the idea...
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