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Subject: Re: Alert! Bob Hyatt -- The World needs you!

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 03:36:58 07/20/99

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On July 19, 1999 at 18:27:48, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On July 19, 1999 at 16:04:31, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On July 19, 1999 at 10:53:44, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On July 19, 1999 at 09:53:36, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>
>>>>On July 18, 1999 at 13:05:23, Francis Monkman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>On July 18, 1999 at 12:56:35, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>The idea sounds attractive, until you realize that the game tree search is
>>>>>>an exponential problem, not a linear one.....  That makes it _very_ difficult
>>>>>>for such a task to be done on computers...
>>>>>
>>>>>But why not treat the computers as nodes in a tree, with sub-delegation
>>>>>software? (Just a thought -- but I built a working parallel audio synthesizer
>>>>>out of multiple TMS99000s back in '84, so I've been 'thinking parallel' for a
>>>>>while -- though not in chess. That's why I thought of you. Hope you don't mind)
>>>>>
>>>>>Say the machines are in a pool. Starting from root, one machine picks the next n
>>>>>(=number of legal moves) machines' addresses. Then they in turn pick 'em off the
>>>>>stack, and so on. Crazy?
>>>>>
>>>>>Francis
>>>>
>>>>Sounds like a deep blue parallellizing approach :)
>>>>
>>>
>>>I don't see where.  DB uses _all_ processors on _every_ move.  For any ply-1
>>>move, the first 4 plies (one move each) are searched by one cpu.  At this
>>>point the tree is split among _all_ the SP processors.  Each processor then
>>>steps thru 4 plies (4 moves) and then uses its own private set of chess
>>>processors to search stuff there in parallel.  And it gets a lot more complex
>>>after that as Hsu has a lot of 'pre-search' tricks to keep things busy...  (See
>>>his thesis for details).
>>>
>>>DB's search is as good as anything we are doing when you use that many
>>>processors.  It probably is better.  Using 4 is not _nearly_ as hard as using
>>>500.
>>
>>Right, that's why i'm using nullmove.
>>
>
>
>You lost me.  What does null-move have to do with anything here?  I did a
>restricted null-move in CB.  Have been using a variable-null-move search
>in crafty for several months (R=3, R=2, R=0 depending on what is going on
>in the search).  And it didn't impact my parallel search decisions at all.

nullmove and only a single SP computer would've been enuf to
save IBM a few hundreds of million dollars :)

>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>Well Francis, i fear it's a bit off reality.
>>>>
>>>>Deep Blue had a similar approach:
>>>>first 4 ply: 1 SP processor
>>>>ply 5..8   : 30 SP processors
>>>>ply 8..12  : 480 hardware processors
>>>>
>>>>above is a similar idea, also not working that well.
>>>>
>>>>There are great dependancies: after first move has been searched one
>>>>can efficiently give other processors a job. Till then they're doing
>>>>nothing (assuming game start).
>>>>
>>>>example problem in your approach: if a processor finds somewhere that it
>>>>wins material, then isn't it a shame in your approach that they all
>>>>have done work for nothing, as they all are searching the same gamespace!



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