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

Author: José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba

Date: 13:30:46 05/17/99

Go up one level in this thread


On May 17, 1999 at 15:00:02, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On May 17, 1999 at 14:15:22, José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba wrote:
>
>>On May 17, 1999 at 09:28:31, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On May 17, 1999 at 00:36:39, James B. Shearer wrote:
>>>
>>>>On May 14, 1999 at 09:52:14, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On May 14, 1999 at 01:38:11, Gregor Overney wrote:
>>>>
>>>>                            <snip>
>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>2) You still need to write the correct algorithms to make this chip work. And
>>>>>>those algorithms are pretty complex (see evaluation functions etc.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>But it has _already_ been done.  All that is left is to use the "new" fab
>>>>>process to increase density and clock speed..  DB's chess chips only ran at
>>>>>20-24 megahertz.  running that up to 16x faster seems quite easy with todays
>>>>>silicon capabilities as that would still be a modest < 400mhz processor.
>>>>
>>>>      This assumes:
>>>>1) Hsu's startup has the right to use the IBM deep blue code.
>>>
>>>He's already publicly stated that he is doing this, so I would assume that
>>>permission has already been granted?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>2) The IBM deep blue code (written for the big endian power chips) can be
>>>>trivially ported to the (little endian) Intel chips used in PCs.
>>>>      I would doubt both of these assumptions.
>>>>                           James B. Shearer
>>>
>>>(2) is a non-issue.  IE 'crafty' is much more 'endian' aware than DB, yet it
>>>runs on big-endian and little-endian machines with no problems at all.  The
>>>PCI interface could 'correct' the endian-order of the data without the chip
>>>ever knowing...
>>
>>	One of the very few things I do not like in crafty is the opening book's
>>sensitivity to endian-ness. Crafty is a great program anyway, even if I play
>>with a small book.
>
>This will be fixed one day.  It isn't difficult, just time-consuming, as the
>best approach is to read in byte-by-byte and then shift/add things together
>to make a word.  of course, the XDR routines could do that too, but since
>'long long' is non-ANSI at present, that is touchy...

	Personally I do not think it is important that every crafty reads the same book
files, especially if it is easier to handle them with their native endian-ness.
With a conversion utility I would be happy (sorry for not offering help to write
one, it was many years ago when I wrote my last program and I do not trust my
programming abilities anymore).



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