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Subject: Re: About Deep Blue

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 11:33:25 12/28/05

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On December 25, 2005 at 08:35:36, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On December 25, 2005 at 08:25:12, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On December 23, 2005 at 18:22:29, Jonas Cohonas wrote:
>>
>>>As far as know deep blue was based on an actual chess playing program (please
>>>correct me if am wrong) Dark Thought, does anyone recall the k/Ns for Dark
>>>Thought on a regular PC at that time?
>>
>>>I am asking this because we could maybe make an estimate of how Dark Thouhgt
>>>would perform k/Ns wise on PC's of today and get a better understanding of what
>>>the real speedup was on Deep Blue.
>>
>>>Maybe i am confusing the program Deep Blue was build up around and maybe it is
>>>not comparable (apples and oranges as Bob would put it), but if feaseble it
>>>would make for an interesting comparison/experiement.
>>
>>>Regards
>>>Jonas
>>
>>Hello Jonas,
>>
>>Dark Thought had an assembly port to alpha. The biggest improvements in
>>darkthought and optimizations were done by Peter Gillgasch, someone who really
>>understood chessprogramming and was state of the art chessprogrammer at the
>>time.
>>
>>In world champs 1997 darkthought searched at a 767Mhz alpha 21164. This machine
>>has 8KB L1 cache. Fastest PC at the time was a 300Mhz PII, which you could not
>>buy yet in a shop. Worldchamps 1997 was in october in Paris.
>>
>>Darkthought had a maximum of 1 million nodes a second.
>>
>>However please realize how restricted its search was last plies.
>>
>>To quote Peter Gillgasch: "it's so stupid that everything gives a cutoff,
>>which makes search very easy". Ferret was also there in 1997 at a 767Mhz alpha.
>>
>>It reached 14 ply in the game against me, which started as a complex middlegame
>>in sicilian (diep black side).
>>
>>In 1999 programs were improved a lot. Darkthought was still the same. Ernst A
>>Heinz had made a fight with Peter Gillgasch, though i do not know cirumstances
>>at all. Whatever happened there is perhaps interesting for insiders to know, but
>>what matters is this: Peter Gillgasch had left Darkthought, so no chance of it
>>ever improving.
>>
>>Deep Blue was a far simpler program. It has been made by hand in the hardware
>>logics. So it has not been made in verilog, but using the utmost lowlevel
>>components that are there in hardware. So you must make a program then by cut'n
>>pasting logical hardware blocks. This is the hardest way to program a machine.
>>
>>That Hsu got a chessprogram like that to work is really amazing.
>>
>>It didn't use nullmove and had a very limited evaluation function. Well you can
>>see that from the games and its logfiles of course. Deep Blue initially was a
>>simple piece square table program. Later on they took over a few Gnuchess 4.0
>>components, but of course in hardware programming is so hard, that you must
>>expect gnuchess to have more knowledge than deep blue.
>>
>>Of course very important to realize is that in 1997 and before it was normal for
>>programs to be true beancounters. Later on chessprogrammers discovered that a
>>bit more agressive tuning of evaluation gives great play. The honour of that
>>invention really goes to Chrilly Donninger.
>>
>>It is very easy to figure out the search speed of Gnuchess 4.0 at todays
>>program, however gnuchess 4.0 is way more sophisticated than Deep Blue, yet it
>>has a few obvious bugs in easy eval terms. Gnuchess for example has nullmove,
>>deep blue doesn't have that.
>>
>>Just imagine how hard it would be to implement nullmove in hardware.
>>
>>Deep Blue didnt use killermoves in hardware. Imagine a 4 ply search in hardware
>>which already is terrible inefficient, then also not using killermoves.
>>
>>A single search of 4 ply in hardware without any sophisticated move ordering,
>>with a huge quiescencesearch and no nullmove and no killermoves, no history
>>moves, no move ordering at all except captures first, you can try yourself too.
>>
>>It is terrible inefficient, but good for your nodes a second. You can easily
>>search 4 million nodes a second like that at todays processors. There is no
>>bottleneck. No hashtable, nothing to stop search speed.
>>
>>But you will search just like Deep Blue around 10 ply first move out of book.
>>
>>Vincent
>
>Note that if you search like deep blue you will get that 10 ply only if you have
>480 processors @ 2 million nodes a second with a terrible speedup.
>
>Note that Deep Blue severely restricted extensions and also forward pruned in
>hardware in order to get that 10-11 ply.
>
>There is a pdf document describing their extension system. Their dual threat
>mechanism is pretty clever taking todays search depths into account.
>
>Vincent

Not pdf since unavailable but html at least:

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:2HidIj2QvY4J:deron.csie.ncue.edu.tw/AI/paper/ppt/49.pdf+anantharaman+dual+threat&hl=en&client=firefox-a




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