Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Microcomputers vs. Grandmasters

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 18:28:12 01/29/99

Go up one level in this thread


5 minutes of deep blue time, at 1000x faster than your machine = 83 hours

Deep Blue had very good opening books.  As I said, they are a database company.
There is no way that a PC would ever have any advantage over such a machine by
the use of some pitiable PC technology.  Consider how fast a mainframe can
search through a disk file.  I don't know how fast deep blue was but I do know
that some mainframe super computers have a multi-gigabit bus and can do I/O at
500M/sec. (That's an "M" not a "K").  They could create and search opening books
and endgame tablebase files that cannot even be imagined for a PC.  Mainframes
are still around, and there is a reason for it.  Chess is a searching task, and
Mainframes are information searchers.  PC's would be absolutely clubbed even
with stupid handicaps.  And why should they accept any sort of handycap anyway?
It's sort of like, "I can beat the best swordfighter in the world if we
blindfold him, make him use his left hand, and make him use a 10 inch rapier."
What exactly does a contest like that prove?

There is a computer that might stand a chance, but chess algorithms would have
to be completely re-written (probably).  The internet is the most powerful
computer in the world, far more powerful than deep blue.  But the coordination
of all those nodes would require software that does not exist.  And there is
considerable question over whether chess is completely separable in that way.



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.