Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 04:26:09 05/19/04
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On May 19, 2004 at 01:29:15, Derek Paquette wrote: >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. >> >>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. >> >>Just my $0.02, curious to your opinions. > >I have to disagree >Fritz and Junior were running on quads last year and got beat out by Shredder on >a dual, and Diep was running on a super computer and still lost, You are forgetting Hydra! The problem of big hardware is that you can't win games based upon tactics nowadays. DIEP at a PC thanks to a slow evaluation function and no forward pruning will not search that deeply in plydepth. In the 80s to quote frans morsch: "all programs were decided before move 25 usual and the loser was the one blundering away a piece or even blundering a queen". At such poor levels a ply deeper with simple program simply wins. Today programs must have and know and do so much, that in order to get in world top you cannot afford to have any weak chain. So like the human world top, it is a game of weakest chains now. That plead for current developments. Doesn't take away that big hardware always is an advantage when playing opponents from the same strength. Losing a few years of your time to get your software to work on a supercluster might be a weakest chain then, as you didn't have time to work on weakest chains. It is well known that some commercial programs sometimes play deliberately single cpu in tournaments because that works better for them than parallel. For whatever dubious forward pruning reason or bugs in parallel search they prefer playing single cpu. I'm not saying that is bad, it just shows that just hardware is not the most important. That said, feel free to offer a big cluster for me to use :) >If i write a program and it runs GREAT on a dual, but if i try and get it to >work on a 32chip cluster and everything mucks up and lose, then what sort of >program do i have now? > >If you got ENORMOUS hardware and kill everyone, its a tribut to the author, and >its a tribute to the program aswell to show just how strong it is on that >hardware, not all programers are as skilled as others.
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