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Subject: Old programs, New processors

Author: Tony Asdourian

Date: 15:55:47 01/15/99


Hello.  I've been reading these postings for a couple of months now, and one
question has never been directly answered to my satisfaction.  I started buying
chess computers(all from ICD(!), at least two of them from Steven Schwartz) back
with Chess Challenger 7, and over the years have (with great pleasure) purchased
Mephisto II, Novag Forte, Novag SuperExpert C, Saitek RISC 2500, and finally
Genius 3, by far the strongest, almost absurdly so. Enough intro, now to my
question.

Recent postings have indicated that Genius 6 is not really a stronger chess
engine than Genius 3; that is, if Genius 3 ran on Pentium II 450 Mhz processors,
it would get very similar results to Genius 6. This got me to thinking-- if old
programs, like RISC 2500, were to run at present day speeds, how well would they
play?  I know that the question is complicated, becasue of hash tables, hardware
vs. software, and a million other reasons, but if one were to imagine these
older programs as "software" and sped up to modern day speeds, APPROXIMATELY
what ELO rating would they deserve?  Would the, for example, RISC 2500, be
within 200 points of Rebel 10? I know it's sort of an odd question, but the best
educated guesses I could get would be very interesting to me, as it would give
me a sense of how much the present day programs really have improved their chess
knowledge, and how much is just brute force.



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