Author: Lar Mader
Date: 18:57:33 06/26/05
Go up one level in this thread
Hydra is so amazingly strong, not so much because the program is superior to other programs, but because the hardware is far superior to the standard PCs that today's commercial programs run on. That being said, the programming is indeed interesting and somewhat different from PC programs in that it is specially designed for a fast multiprocessor search that can take advantage of specially programmed FPGA hardware for search extensions and evaluation. Also, because some of the chess evaluation is implemented in the FPGA hardware, it is able to perform evalations that would be too expensive (with regard to time/speed) for pure software engines. I think a lot of people would say that on some idealized equivalent hardware setup, Shredder 9.0 is a stronger engine than Hydra, from a pure engine standpoint. But this comparison is pretty loose: it isn't really fair or accurate. It's very apples and oranges. For many reasons, such as those mentioned above, you really have to consider the entire machine, the hardware running the engine, how the hardware resources are designed, and how well the software is optimized for this hardware, etc. Keeping the above in mind, which means that pure numbers don't tell the whole story, it's interesting to note: the Hydra team claims their program considers 200 million moves a second. Shredder 9, on a very fast dual CPU PC probably would be doing well to hit 2 million positions per second. Maybe you can get 4 million/sec on a quad. So you might say that Hydra is roughly 50 times as fast as Shredder (running on some pretty fancy PC hardware). Again, this doesn't accurately tell the story of how the strength of the two machines/engines would compare, but it is impressive. I don't think it's any surprise that Hydra is exceptionally strong. -= Lar On June 26, 2005 at 21:29:30, K. Burcham wrote: > > >I assume Chrilly wrote the Code for the Nimzo program. >If this is true then what were his results from year to year when working with >chess code against his competitors, Ed, Robert, etc... >Was Chrilly winning some of the time, most of the time? >How many times was Nimzo world champion? >Is Chrilly an IM, GM..? > >How come all of a sudden this Chrilly has a program that some say beats >shredder, all of the worlds top programmers, and now can beat the number 7 super >GM in the world. You think people in any other sport can all of a sudden beat >the worlds best, when they have proven in the past they do not have world class >talent. > >Of course if someone has the stats to show me that Chrilly was already world >class programmer and was winning against world class programmers---then I will >have learned about Chrilly. I am like many here, I do not know. So I would like >for some of the chess program history buffs to fill me in on this guy that is >kicking ass at the top. > >Also, now that Chrilly is on top, Frederic would you please tell Chrilly to comb >his hair---if it will not comb---have him use some hair gel. > >kburcham
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