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Subject: Re: DB Chip will kill all comercial programs or.....

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 07:00:03 05/14/99

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On May 13, 1999 at 23:00:53, Eelco de Groot wrote:

>
>Robert, Mr. Hyatt, thanks for all the new info on the 'Deep Blue for consumers'
>chip! Does Mr. Hsu already have a name for it? I suppose you could call it 'Baby
>Blue' , but maybe that is too innocent a name for this monster... (A topic for
>the polls, maybe, choosing a good name?). Regarding your thoughts on 'guts' , I
>am not a programmer, but does not the 'soul' of a program  reside for a large
>part in its positional understanding also? Since the chip can be operated in
>parallel to a software program, could  it not be used mainly for a deep tactical
>evaluation? Letting the program do a 1 ply search on all the positional features
>Deep Blue is not very good at, while the chip does a 4 ply mainly tactical
>search? It would be up to the programmer then to decide how much weight each of
>the two evaluations must get to retain the original character of the program. Am
>I making any sense here?
>

yes... but the problem here is that this is what programs like Fritz/Nimzo/etc
do to an extent.  They do a lot of work at the root of the tree, and then have
a very primitive evaluation at the tips.  And they make gross positional
mistakes as a result.  The _right_ way to search is a good search, followed by
a _full_ positional evaluation.  And that is _very_ slow (which is why the fast
programs don't do this).  DB _does_ however, because they do the eval in
hardware and the cost is minimal compared to our cost.


IE you don't want to search 1 ply deep, and find that move "x" is positionally
the best, then let the hardware search 20 plies deep and not notice that if you
play "x", your opponent gets two connected passed pawns on the 6th, absolute
control of the 7th rank, and the only open file on the board to boot...  That
is the mistake that 'root processors' make regularly...  too much changes
between the root, where the evaluation parameters are set, and the tips where
they are applied...



>Kind regards,
>
>Eelco de Groot.



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