Author: KarinsDad
Date: 15:42:44 01/06/99
Go up one level in this thread
On January 06, 1999 at 16:37:42, Christopher R. Dorr wrote: > >At these salaries, would they need any NetWare Engineers/weak Masters? I know >someone who might be willing to help out :) Heck...they'd only need to pay me >$250,000 a year....I'm flexible like that. :) > >I'd really like to see the results of something like this. Obviously it won't >happen, but it would be interesting, both from the perspective of chess >programming and from that of software engineering as a discipline. > >While we could never really know what would happen until this was tried, my gut >instinct still tells me that the program they would put out wouldn't be that >much better than the best competing programs from Ed, ChessBase, etc. > >How much work (on the engine specifically; I know they could do great stuff with >the interface and features) do you think could be parted out to the other >programmers? > >When I wrote my pathetic little excuse for a chess program, it had many of the >components of decent programs (piece square tables, various extensions, decent >opening book [never really completed], relatively complex evaluation function), >I couldn't see where I could have used the help of someone as or less >experienced than I was with chess programming. Admittedly, I wasn't a very good >programmer, but I had read the literature, and dissected some of the >source-available programs out there. > >Perhaps at the more advanced levels, some programming assistance could be of >help, but from a software engineering perspective, I have my doubts about >involving a team in this; I think you'd reach the point of diminishing returns >*very* quickly. > >Chris Chris, A team such as this would have several things going for them. 1) The Microsoft talent could be of the caliber that they could search the web (and the ICCA journals), run everything past the rest of the team in brainstorming sessions, and within a month, have a reasonable understanding of the concepts involved in the current technology (i.e. get up to speed). I downloaded about 8.5 Meg of thesis papers and other information from the web and digested most of it in a weekend. Does that make me as knowledgable as Bob or Ed? Of course not. But then again, I don't have them sitting in the office next to mine. 2) The chess programmers could be an interface between the MS engineers and the GMs. The GMs could relate deeper chess knowledge, the chess programmers could come up with ideas on how to implement that knowledge into a program and the MS engineers could do the prototyping and proof of concept. IBM introduced it's new 332 MHz microprocessor last year, the fastest chip available at that point on the RS/6000 SP. This chip is 5 times faster than the ones used in Deep Blue. Using this chip and a quad configuration, Bob could create a program similar to Deep Blue (since MS purchased the source) that does 16 million nodes per second (200,000,000 nodes per second Deep Blue * 4 processors in a quad / 256 processors in Deep Blue * 5 times faster). If you assume that Deep Blue was running at a 2775 level and that this new program is running on the above system at 8% the speed of Deep Blue, shouldn't this new program be able to run at least at a 2700 level? How much more could Bob do with a specialized team, a lot of resources, and a case of light beer? The diminishing returns comes in when you buy the second case of beer. KarinsDad PS. I think I'm going to bow out of this thread now. It has gone from mildly amusing to just plain silly.
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