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Subject: Re: WCCC Hardware Uniformity

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 20:24:48 07/07/04

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On July 07, 2004 at 22:20:12, steven blincoe wrote:

>>
>>Would you exclude Brutus?  Or would I have to use their special hardware in
>>Crafty, which would be tough?  What about deep blue or Belle or Cray Blitz or
>>other programs that simply won't run on a PC?  Could we require everyone run on
>>a Cray?
>
>i dont even know who Brutus is
>:))
>
>can it not be ported or written to a common hardware system?

No.  It has special-purpose FPGA hardware.  Similar in concept to Belle, HiTech
and Deep Thought/Deep Blue.  Not X86 based at all.  Not portable to X86 either.
Of course other examples include "chessmachine" by Ed, using (I think) an ARM
processor many years ago.

>
>please explain what is so hard about the simple idea of announcing well in
>advance that a dell(for example)computer running on a xxx mip computer with a
>yyyy processor will be the hardware used
>all entrants will have their programs installed on the tournament hall
>computers before the match
>
>now i realize that in the early days with hugh mainframes you could not possibly
>expect Kaissa to use the same hardware as Chess 3.5    but today?
>


Some commercial programs are written in assembler.  Is it necessary to pick X86
simply because they are in asm?  Or can we use MIPS, Opteron, SPARC, PPC, Alpha,
Hitachi/IBM, Cray, etc?  What about the person that uses bitboards and writes
for 64 bit machines?  You make him run on a 32 bit machine?  What about the
person that takes the time to do a parallel search?  Make him run on one CPU and
throw all that work away?  What about the program designed for a vector machine?
 Not allowed since X86 is the chosen platform.

this is nowhere near as easy to do as it seems...





>or is it, that this would force all programmers to go out and buy the same
>system to be used at the tournament site and it would cause a finanical hardship
>?
>
>Steve



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