Author: Robert C Gates
Date: 13:39:29 05/19/04
Go up one level in this thread
On May 19, 2004 at 10:51:41, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >On May 19, 2004 at 10:18:01, Ingo Althofer wrote: > >>In the Leiden tournament (in April 2004) Hydra was terribly bashed by Shredder. >>Perhaps after that they only play in events without Shredder. ;) >> >>Ingo Althofer. > >I feel we must not be too hard judging the hydra team. It's the sheikh who >doesn't want to join in Israel. I'm sure the entire team wants to. > >However any claim that Hydra is the strongest chess program on earth must be >forgotten. It was very lucky in Leiden in many games. I'm sure the quick level >of 90 0 and majority of participants not using big hardware has lead to Hydra >scoring more points than it based upon what it showed earned IMHO. > >Basically the ultra agressive speculative evaluation which Hydra uses to play >means it will never win a world title. Ultra agressive behaviour has 2 >advantages : > a) you kill every bad tested program with big bugs left in eval (especially >king safety) thanks to agressive attack and big search depth. > b) it has a nice playing style. attack attack without looking back... > >It has 1 major disadvantage: > a) it is incorrect and will simply lose in future > >Note that there is a subtle but important difference between agressive play and >speculative agressive play. > >So time is running out slowly for Hydra now. 1 chip is not so slow now compared >to software, but next year it will be when the dual opterons at 1 chip start to >arrive. > >The software guys all will profit from hashtables a lot at opteron and each >generation getting faster we profit a lot. > >Hardware however doesn't profit from all that. Last 6 plies no hashtables for >Hydra... > >Hydra's parallel search doesn't scale to more processors easily when compared to >software using a hashtable. Moving from 8 to 16 processors i didn't see it >search deeper actually (i forgot to ask during ict4 how many processors used, >frankly i didn't care at that moment). > >So in 2010 they probably will be still 16 processor clocked at 33Mhz. > >Perhaps one time an update to 66Mhz and PCI-X myrinet cards (3 us one way ping >pong latency versus the current ones it has are like 8 us). > >So in 2004 world champs the hardware advantage from hydra would be not there, >but in 2005 for sure also gone against many non-world champs participants. > >What is left is a strong program definitely in world top and of course eyes >closed crushes software like crafty (even when using just 1 hardware processor, What do you mean Crushes programs Like Crafty? Crafty is one of the Best around. >because eval just matters). > >However it is outdated right now IMHO. > >It's advantage IMHO was using 8-16 processors, not for being in hardware. > >And knowing the parallel skills of the university paderborn (feldman & co) >adding more processors we can only expect a slowdown. > >When running at 460 processors with diep i did several experiments turning off >hashtable last few plies and had very discouraging results there. > >Note that Feldmann correctly had already concluded this years ago (that one >*needs* to do hashtable lookups everywhere; for me it is amazing that Feldmann >could draw so many correct conclusions with such bad software implementations).
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