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Subject: Re: Suggestion for an interesting tournament - Volunteers needed

Author: Christophe Theron

Date: 12:04:53 09/19/99

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On September 19, 1999 at 12:13:03, Will Singleton wrote:

>On September 19, 1999 at 10:12:59, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On September 18, 1999 at 22:49:20, Christophe Theron wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>I think a tournament on slow hardware (386-16 to 386-40, or 486 <=33MHz)
>>>including top programs of the early 90s and programs of today would be very
>>>interesting. We could amongst other things see if there have been really no
>>>advances in software in the last 10 years.
>>
>
>>I don't think the test would be 'fair' if that is what you want to examine.
>>IE many of the software improvements come as a result of hardware changes that
>>make the programs fast enough that they can do things they couldn't on slower
>>hardware.  IE would you play _anyone_ if you could only do a 5 ply search?
>>Would you even think about null-move R=2?  Would you have your program spend
>>50% of its time in the evaluation?  THose are all decisions I had to address
>>and the answer would be different if I was doing 1K nodes per second on a
>>386/16..
>>
>
>My program (since it only plays on one machine) definitely is targeted to that
>speed (300 mhz).  It wouldn't be the same program if it had to play on a 68000
>25 mhz.
>
>However, I'd like to know if some of the commercial programmers make provisions
>for different targets, and alter search and eval strategies based on machine
>speed.
>
>Will

I think it's a very bad idea to target for a given speed. Sorry, but I see no
reason to do this. When I make a change in Tiger I make various tests on
different computers to be sure that nothing is broken. These tests include blitz
games against Genius5 on my 386sx20 and longer games on a 300MHz computer.

I think that making sure that the strength is unaffected at very different
speeds is a way to make sure that you are going into the right direction. At
least I think it works for me...


    Christophe



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