Author: Omid David Tabibi
Date: 13:35:38 08/12/04
Go up one level in this thread
On August 12, 2004 at 15:42:35, Russell Reagan wrote: >On August 12, 2004 at 15:07:51, Sune Fischer wrote: > >>I know what you mean of course, but speed really is a factor in computer chess. >>It's not the most important factor, but not something to be ignored either. > >>I'm not sure I see the point of writing an engine in a slow language, why >>handicap yourself from the beginning? >>Do you not want to write the best engine you can? > >Here is something to think about. You start writing a chess program in C or C++. >I start writing a chess program in C#. I have mine up and running three times >faster than you do. Let's say it takes me one month (just for discussion) to get >my engine playing legal chess. That means that by the time you have your program >playing legal chess (just legal chess, not good chess), I will have been working >on search and evaluation for two months. Let's say your program runs two to four >times as fast as mine. Now we continue developing for another month or two, and >we have a match between our programs. After six months of development, which >program do you think will win the match? I think it would either be close, or >the C# engine would be the favorite. > >Okay, what about two years after we started? Five years? Ten years? Does the >rule of getting three times more work done still apply then? I think at some >point it will have diminishing returns and the slower C programmer will catch up >and then have an advantage in execution speed. But maybe I am wrong about that. >In the short term, at least, the C# programmer will have a very big advantage >and the C/C++ programmer will be struggling to play catch up. How many C# chess programs are there? > >Think of it another way. If Shredder was two to four times slower, it would >still be a huge favorite against almost any of the hundreds of engines out >there. You could count on one hand the number of engines that would have a >significant advantage over it. Fritz, Junior, and maybe a couple of others. So I >think speed is overrated unless you are at the top where things are already very >close. Then it can become a more significant factor, such as going from #3 in >the world to #1. > >Basically what this tells me is that there are a lot of other factors that are >more important than speed. At some point, when you have taken care of a lot of >the other important factors, improving the speed will give a significant boost. >In other words, making Crafty go four times faster will mean more than making >TSCP go four times faster. There are a lot of other things that would benfit >TSCP more than faster execution.
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