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Subject: Re: An Experiment that disproves Hyatt's 1000X NPS Theory

Author: David Mitchell

Date: 13:23:43 09/17/05

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On September 17, 2005 at 10:04:32, ALI MIRAFZALI wrote:

>Hyatt has claimed many times that a Nodes Per Second Factor of one thousand
>times would not be overcome by the program with the less Nodes per second.In
>this Experiment it was shown conclusively that this is false .Although I played
>4 games ,I do not think the result would have been different if I had played a
>hundred more.Time Control 40 MOVES IN 2 HOURS followed by sudden death in 1
>hour.Hardware: GNU CHESS 4.11 a program from 1996 ran a celeron 1.8 Gig machine
>;Chess Tiger on Palm ran on the Palm Tungten E.NODES PER SECOND:ON THE
>AVERAGE:CHESSTIGER ON PALM 500 per second ,GNU CHESS 4.11 500000 per second on
>the celeron 1.8 Gig.1000X DIFFERENCE.Hyatt and some other people have always
>argued about the supremecy of DeepBlue based on its speed.I think these days
>these arguments are false;and Speed does not mean as much as it used to.Deep
>blue would be crushed by todays program's.A lot of STRENGTH is EVALUATION
>FUNCTION.Take a look at these games:
>Match ended in 2-2 draw.

What you've shown Ali, is that a theory without a proper experiment to prove or
disprove it, is worth about as much as yesterday's newspaper, after it's lined
the bottom of the parakeet's cage. :) Even a theory as great as relativity MUST
have SOME experimental evidence to support it before it can be accepted as true.

Your "experiment" has no control, and frankly comparing GNU with ChessTiger, on
wildly different hardware, is just nonsense. Show me one match on equal hardware
where these two programs were EVER equal? You can't, because they aren't equal
strength, and never have been.

My theory (which also can't be proven, now), is that Deep Blue was mainly
hindered by the cost and labor involved in improving itself. It's the curse of
making a chess playing machine largely in hardware.

What Hyatt, and many others (including myself), are so impressed about Deep Blue
is the sheer potential it offered. You have to remember back to the early days
of chess programs - when you could literally CRY for some decent improvement in
your program's search speed/depth.

And then along came the hardware "gang" (Belle, Deep Thought, HiTech, Deep Blue,
etc.), and it was like a ray of sunshine from the heavens, warming your forehead
on a cold and windy day. The one barrier, that no program could dream of
breaching, even with a Cray supercomputer, was shrunk right down to size. What a
wonder to see!

Would Shredder or Zappa stomp Deep Blue, today? Who knows? Quite possibly yes.
Chess software has improved in these years. But give Hsu and his team a while to
"upgrade" the software, and clearly DB would be at the top of the heap. Think of
it like Hydra, on steroids, with just a lot more muscle.

This planet has never seen a faster searcher or evaluator than DB2. I didn't say
the smartest, or the best, because our algorithm's have improved. Just the
fastest.

Dave




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