Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 22:02:39 07/09/04
Go up one level in this thread
On July 09, 2004 at 23:18:40, Eric Oldre wrote: >I have a few ideas that if such a tourney ever takes place, may be useful for >the issue of unequal hardware. > >I used to be involved in the local stock car racing scene, and they had similar >issues to resolve. what they did was to say. if you place in the top 3 in a >race. you have the option of buying the winners engine for the price of $800 >plus your engine. > >This kept people from spending huge amounts of money on their motors and buying >the race. but still allowed for some differences. I think a similar scheme may >be applicable here. > >The tournament could have a rule that the hardware you use must only be worth >$1500 (or pick a different amount). This could either be enforced with a >gentleman's agreement, or if that is not considered good enough. you could say >that someone had the option of buying the winners hardware for some amount. > >This allows people to target different platforms. PowerPC, Athlon-64, or >something else. without allowing someone to just buy the tournament. what do >people think of this idea. anyone have other suggestions? Okay, I'll try again :) Allowing people to bring any hardware they want is the fairest way to run a computer chess tournament. Any attempt to equalize the hardware will cause more problems than it solves. Point 1: Not possible Accomplishing a fair, equal hardware event is not possible. No matter what you do, you penalize someone arbitrarily. Everyone chooses different areas to focus on, and the tournament really becomes unfair when you penalize someone heavily for an arbitrary reason. This is much more unfair than allowing different hardware. Open hardware doesn't really affect the outcome drastically, for reasons described below. Point 2: Not needed There is no need for an equal hardware computer chess tournament. Searching a chess game tree is an exponential problem. Unless the engines are very close in playing strength, hardware isn't going to affect the outcome. In the early 1990s PC programs started winning the WCCC, despite playing on much slower hardware than the hardware projects like HiTech and Deep Blue (prototype). Crafty and Junior played a handicap match where Crafty had a 10:1 time advantage. Crafty won, barely. Diep ran on a super computer with 512 processors in the 2003 WCCC. It finished 6th. In all three of these situations (Deep Blue prototype, Crafty, and Diep) the better software won despite being at a hardware disadvantage. It has been a long time since hardware stole a WCCC. There really isn't any need to equalize hardware, and there are certainly huge downsides to trying. Point 3: No benefit There is no added benefit of an equal hardware event. People say that they want an equal hardware event so that they know who has the best software, usually so they know what will run best on their home computer. There are several problems with this. First, there are not enough games to really decide which software is the best. You need many more games between two opponents to get an idea who is better. Even a weak engine will get a draw against a strong one from time to time. Second, the result of the tournament is sometimes heavily influenced by some freak occurance. For instance, Fritz locked up against Falcon and lost on time this year at the 2004 WCCC. Currently Fritz is 1 behind the leader. That could be the difference in the outcome of the event right there. A tournament is not even close to a scientific experiment. The SSDF is the closest thing you can find to that, and it is better than any tournament in that respect by a mile. Third, if the equal hardware is AMD Opteron machines, that doesn't tell you what will perform the best on your Pentium 4 machine at home, or your friend's 32-bit Athlon XP. So you don't learn anything more from a 10 round equal hardware tournament than you do from a 10 round open hardware tournament.
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