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Subject: Re: Did Hydra change over the past year that much?

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 10:50:53 05/27/05

Go up one level in this thread


On May 27, 2005 at 11:54:03, Torstein Hall wrote:

>On May 27, 2005 at 08:45:58, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On May 26, 2005 at 16:29:46, Joshua Shriver wrote:
>>
>>>Interesting... so how many of the 32 cpu's are CPU vs FPGA custom chips?
>>
>>It has 32 custom FPGA cards.
>>
>>>Have there been any stats as to nps on each fpga, and what kind of bus does it
>>
>>You are interested in objectivity, the hydra team is a very bad person to ask in
>>that case. They are interested in blowing it up to unheard dimensions.
>>
>>>rest on? I thought the FPGA's where attached on a PCI backplane, and if they're
>>>working with that many, have they come across any latency problems over the PCI
>>>bus.
>>
>>That's why they do not have hashtables inside the fpga cards.
>>
>>>Hydra intrigues me, since parallel programming is what inspired me to want to do
>>>an engine. (Besides also loving the game)
>>
>>Their parallel algorithm isn't worth much in the real world i guess. I don't
>>give a penny for their parallel efforts. If they would have a good parallel
>>algorithm, hydra would already run at 1024 cpu's by now for sure.
>>
>>Also the way it gets shown to the world is kind of the usual way.
>>
>>First dumb down 1 cpu a lot by not using hashtable last 6 ply, then show a good
>>speedup of a lobotomized 1 cpu versus 32.
>>
>>We know that drill from the past already.
>>
>>Like cilkchess (MiT), a fast bitboard engine, getting just like 2500-5000 nodes
>>a second at a single cpu at 512 cpu's 500Mhz, and diep a program 20 times
>>faster, gets at the same hardware at 512 cpu's 10000-20000 nodes a second a cpu.
>>
>>I mean, cilkchess team can claim whatever speedup they have, but without cilk
>>their program at 1 such cpu gets 200000 nodes a second, as it's a simplistic
>>bitboards engine with near to no eval (crafty has 4 times more knowledge in eval
>>than cilkchess in fact). So from my viewpoint they are missing a factor 40+
>>somewhere in the compare to the single cpu.
>>
>>See the problem of the parallel speedup of Hydra?
>>
>>They can brag whatever about speedup, as long as they aren't comparing an
>>optimized single cpu version with the 32 processor version, it's not a very fair
>>compare.
>>
>>You can get a million nodes, but if all what you do with it is search 6 ply in a
>>highly selective manner, that still is 6 thin plies.
>>
>>It isn't 7 ply which i get with perhaps at most 100000 nodes, without any
>>forward pruning (just nullmove). Then we didn't discuss the huge evaluation
>>difference even.
>>
>>Rudolf Huber (SOS) calls that: "they first slow it down, or make the branching
>>factor horrible, in order to be able to claim a better speedup".
>>
>>>-Josh
>
>What kind of interest has the Hydra team of doing that? Anyway, the fact
>remains, it blows all PC programs, including Diep, of the board!
>Simple or complicated paralell search, null move etc. etc. who cares as long as
>it is the strongest chess machine on the planet!
>
>Torstein

No proof for it.
It is only an opinion.

I believe that Shredder is stronger than Hydra and Shredder was unlucky to
suffer from a bug so the version that played hydra was weaker than the
commercial version.

Uri



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