Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 13:16:15 09/20/05
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On September 20, 2005 at 04:06:56, Bruce Moreland wrote: >On September 19, 2005 at 12:01:00, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>If you were to ask anyone here, at the beginning of a WCCC-type event, "who is >>the favorite?" the most common answer by far would be Shredder. Probably >>followed by Deep Junior and/or Deep Fritz (if they played). >> >>Why is that? >> >>Because Shredder has won several events in recent years? >> >>Because everyone watches shredder games on the chess servers and notice how well >>it plays in most all positions? >> >>Those are the _same_ criteria I would use in guessing how DB would perform >>today, based on how it performed when it was active, and how its predecessor >>performed under the same conditions... >> >>It really was a remarkable machine. All the more so back in 1996/1997. It >>might not have nearly the same edge over us today that it had back in 1997, but >>if we are going to speculate, then we at least have to speculate that >>development continued on DB. In 1996 I was doing about 80K nodes per second. >>Today I can do about 100X more. So Deep Blue should get at _least_ that same >>improvement, if not more. 20 billion nodes per second or more is just >>unimaginable... >> >>If they had continued software improvements as well, they would be doing beyond >>20 ply searches, assuming null-move was added, probably some forward pruning >>since they did some of this in the hardware anyway, etc... >> >>It would be remarkably strong. Probably impossibly strong. > >No credit for imaginary work. Deep thought wasn't "imaginary". It beat the hell out of me and everyone else for almost 10 years. And produced a 2650+ performance rating against human GM players over 25 consecutive games... Deep Blue also wasn't imaginary. It beat plenty of GM players in exhibition matches all over the world. I watched one at a supercomputing conference, for example. DB 2 also wasn't imaginary. Unless Kasparov's imagination somehow made him lose... > >We didn't see enough of DB to judge. Who is to blame for this? They are, >although to be fair, "they" may be IBM corporate bean-counting deal to some >extent. Should they benefit from this by becoming permanent hypothetical >computer chess world champion? Hell no. I'm not sure I agree about the "enough to judge". I personally got to see far more of the thing than I wanted to see, starting at the first event I played them in in 1987 and stretching forward through the last ACM event ever held, in 1994. I wish the "final product" had been left standing for a while, but even without it, it is pretty clear it was a dangerous box. As many human GM players will certainly attest. yes, most programs today, on hardware such as what I used in the WCCC, are also very dangerous. But we are certainly not "far ahead of deep blue" otherwise we would all be producing 3000+ performance ratings in long GM games... We aren't. Yet. So while we might be (today) in the same ballpark, we _are_ in the same ballpark. We haven't left them in our dust (yet). I've regularly seen search speeds of 20M nodes per second on the WCCC box I used. I have seen 40M on an 8-way dual-core. That is under a factor of 10 slower than DB. So its "edge" today would certainly have eroded to something fairly small. Unless they had continued the project... > >You don't get to win if you don't play. > >bruce When you think about it, they both played _and_ won. Maybe not as much as we'd like, but certainly DT played plenty and showed its strength. The rest is an issue with the IBM bean-counters most likely...
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