Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 14:10:20 03/30/99
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On March 30, 1999 at 16:09:54, Christopher R. Dorr wrote: >On March 30, 1999 at 13:57:39, Bruce Moreland wrote: >>If you claim that Crafty is stronger than Ferret on equal hardware in head to >>head games, certainly in 5 0 blitz, you haven't been paying attention. Sorry, >>but that's true, and there is a tremendous amount of evidence to back that up. >> > >I'm not necessarily saying that. How do you measure superiority, though? This >isn't as arcane as it seems. I have a 2150 rated friend who has a *big* negative >record against some local 1900. Looking at head-to-head, you'd say the 1900 was >the superior player. Looking at their ratings, you would say that the 2150 was >the superior player. What are we talking about here? That is a good question, yes. Your suggestion was that Crafty on equal hardware may be as good or better than anything else at blitz. The evidence is the rating of Mofongo in relation to the ratings of the other computer accounts. I argue that Mofongo's rating is inflated when compared with other computers on ICC. The reason is that it plays the opponents and time controls that will maximize its rating. Other programs don't do this. I can't argue about comparative performance against humans, that's just way to random to talk about, in my opinion. I don't believe that mine does any worse than Crafty does against humans, certainly. And it doesn't seem to do any worse than Crafty against other computers. And it does well against Crafty on equal hardware or even a hardware disadvantage. I'm confused as to how someone can say that Crafty may be better, without getting into some really murky justification. And that's just mine. There are plenty of others that do *very* well at blitz. >>>3. Crafty is designed to be SMP. To say it's not fair to state that Crafty on a >>>Quad Xeon is better than Fritz on a single PIII is the same as saying that it's >>>not fair that Deep Blue runs on a specially designed computer. If the question >>>is what's the best, a very valid way of looking at is to measure their >>>performance on their optimal machine. Crafty's optimal machine is a Quad Xeon or >>>PIII, while Fritz's is a single PIII 500.On these optimal machines, I honestly >>>doubt Fritz's superiority. >> >>No way. I argue against this on two grounds: >> >>1) Crafty has not been crippled by its port to SMP, at least not to my >>knowledge. It should run just fine on one processor. At very least the SMP >>part can be compiled out. SMP is an additional thing, not a transforming thing. >> > >And Fritz should run just fine on that Quad Xeon. Is it Bob's fault that Frans >didn't do any SMP stuff? Multiprocessors aren't as rare as you might think >anymore. Certainly not more rare right now that the new PIII stuff. On equal >hardware, I don't know. What hardware. How about my old 486/66 w/ 4 MB RAM? Bet >you Crafty will run on it. Fritz5? Doubt it. Lots of people still have these >around. Where do we target? The lowest common denominator? the highest? Perhaps >an appropriate way to look at this would be a scale of equipment, that reflects >the fact the Crafty is probably better than Fritz on very low-end and very >high-end stuff, and Fritz is better in the middle. I'm confused as to how you can come up with this. How do you compare the software element of two micro programs? The most logical thing to do *this year* is run them on conservative middle- to high-end system. It's ridiculous to try to compare them on a weird system that has extremely important features (extra processors) that one can take advantage of and the other can't. You might as well run Crafty on an Alpha and expect Fritz to use the FX!32 emulator. The Alpha might be faster than the Intel machine, so arguably it would be a better platform, right? Not Crafty's fault if Fritz isn't compiled to run on it. It would make a lot more sense to use a PIII than an SMP machine, since both programs would have been targeted at a similar chip, meaning the PII. You'd expect them both to scale properly. Imagine if you benchmarked these programs on various systems. You can't just produce a benchmark that shows that Crafty is 4x as fast or whatever, and assume that this tells the whole story and that everyone will draw the proper conclusions. You have to footnote this, and explain that something important has been left out of Fritz because Frans has not written it yet. That's only fair. Anyone who has listened to me knows that I have no problem with Crafty, but the conclusions being made here are just wrong. They won't be wrong in a year or two though, although it will probably be a while before you won't have to mention that you compared a non-SMP program with an SMP program on an SMP system. bruce
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