Author: Bryan Cabalo
Date: 19:59:07 07/07/04
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On July 07, 2004 at 22:08:20, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On July 07, 2004 at 19:27:11, Bryan Cabalo wrote: > >>Why doesn't everyone run their competitive chess programs with the same hardware >>so that no single chess engine has a hardware advantage? >> >>It seems unfair to me that some competitors have access to faster and better >>hardware. I would think of it as a science experiment where the only variable >>is the chess engine itself and _not_ the hardware that its running on. That is >>the real test. I want to see the real winner of this event competing on equal >>hardware playing grounds. I think this would help with hardware uniformity in >>future WCCC events. There has to be something in the rules about playing with >>equal hardware. Maybe after this year the WCCC could supply the use of one >>computer for each participant, or even quad opterons for each participant!! > >flawed idea. What about the program that can't use more than one CPU? What >about the program written in assembly language, say for a SPARC, or for an >ITANIUM, or even a CRAY? > >Pick an architecture and you will certainly exclude a sub-set of possible >players. > >A uniform-platform event is an interesting idea. But then again so is a "bring >the biggest hammer you can find" event. Here then, the biggest hammer would be a cluster of computers utilized for a distributed search. A chess program that makes use of multiple processors dedicated to finding the best move, kind of like what Stanford is doing with their distributed protien folding project: http://folding.stanford.edu/. Could this quite possibly be what Deep Junior is using?! Again, seems like a huge advantage to have if this is the case! >IE would you want to exclude Deep Blue >were it still playing? It had its own special hardware. What about Belle? >What about the more recent Brutus with its special hardware? > That's true. > >> >>After all, we are just testing which chess search program is better, right? > >Not necessarily. We also want to know which chess _player_ is better. And the >player is composed of both the program _and_ the hardware... Okay, so bottom line SDDF says which 0x86 compiled chess playing _program_ is the computer chess champion because they test these programs on equal hardware. WCCC says which overall chess playing _system_ is the computer chess champion: program, compiler, hardware, operator are included. I dig that.
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