Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 09:01:05 05/11/99
Go up one level in this thread
On May 11, 1999 at 03:06:32, Dave Gomboc wrote: >On May 07, 1999 at 19:18:22, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On May 07, 1999 at 18:46:32, Dann Corbit wrote: >> >>>On May 07, 1999 at 17:48:48, vitor wrote: >>>[snip] >>>>this is off topic, but why didnt you ever try making a hardware version cray >>>>blitz? or is that some future project? it seems cray blitz was always up against >>>>hardware programs like belle ,hitech, deep thought. >>>Of those machines, only deep thought had dedicated chess circuits. The others >>>were general purpose machines, running a computer program. Just like Cray >>>Blitz. Cray Blitz was more than a match for all except Deep Thought, which had >>>specialized hardware. >>> >>>Why didn't Dr. Hyatt write special hardware circuits? That would be a pretty >>>expensive hobby. >> >> >>actually they were _all_ hardware machines. Belle was the first special- >>purpose chess machine... Hitech was next, built as a vlsi project at CMU, >>and finally deep thought which also originated at CMU. Cray Blitz was the >>only general-purpose computer program of the group, although CB was highly >>coupled to the Cray architecture, with a vectorized move generator, and a >>very good parallel search... >> >>And you are right, in that except for deep thought, Cray Blitz was stronger >>than the others... > >I was under the impression that Hitech was equal or (perhaps) slightly better >than Cray Blitz. It lost on tiebreak at the '86 WCCC to your program, but won >some of the North American tournaments in the '84 through '88 range, didn't it? > >Dave Berliner wanted everyone to believe this. And in 1985 it was even true as we were searching 80K nodes per second to hitech's 120K or so. But in 1986 and later, we were better. In 1989 we were 5X faster due to newer hardware... HiTech won the 1985 ACM event, we won the 1986 WCCC event (and beat HiTech in the final round to win, in fact). I don't remember them winning anything beyond that because in 1987 this pesky thing known as "chiptest" and then "deep thought" was unveiled... :) IMHO, HiTech was never "better" than CB. It may have been as good. But the only 'down' time for Cray Blitz was the 1985 event where a poor change by me produced some ugly pawn positional play that killed it in two games in 1985, and in the second round of the 1986 WCCC before I found and excised the 4 lines of code that were killing it. After 1987 there was never any doubt who was best from that point forward, the author being Hsu... And CB only got faster while hitech was 'stuck' at the same place it is stuck at today, speed-wise. Most micros would give it a good lickin' today, although based on my analysis of some 1986 WCCC games played by CB, it was as tactically strong in 1986 as Crafty is today on the quad xeon box... which is not bad..
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