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Subject: Re: Bean Counter

Author: Will Singleton

Date: 12:22:02 09/29/99

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On September 29, 1999 at 14:23:13, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On September 29, 1999 at 05:46:09, Jari Huikari wrote:
>
>>On September 29, 1999 at 04:06:36, Will Singleton wrote:
>>
>>>On September 28, 1999 at 23:25:49, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>>I am going to use a paradigm that I don't think anyone else has even tried (but
>>>>then again, I may be completely reinventing the wheel).
>>
>>>And, what might that be?
>>
>>I am interested too! I have also tried many things that others probably
>>haven't. But so far it has been *removing* the wheels... :-)
>Well, it has no commercial practicality, because it will suck if you don't have
>a pile of processors.
>Think of a chess program that starts not as main() but as a thread.  Now, from
>some position, I will start up a pile of threads -- each having a problem to do
>analogous to a regular analysis of a position.  For starters, I will have a
>thread analyzing the current position -- which will be permanent throughout the
>life of the move.  Then, for each possible subsequent position, I will have a
>thread examining each of those.  Now, after a heartbeat interval, the threads
>will check with a synchonization object and show what they have found so far.
>The "dead ends" will be abandoned and the threads will look for new tasks (e.g.
>for the most beneficial looking trails, they will examine subsequent positions
>for those positions).  Obviously, this will require a *PILE* of processors to
>work well.  However, on message passing machines or other non-SMP machines, it
>should work like a charm.  In other words, I could get the full horsepower of
>one of those Silicon Graphics/Cray machines.  It should also work well with a
>pile of Hsu's chips.  On a single CPU Intel machine, it will blow chunks and
>die.  Don't care, I don't want to sell it.

I don't have any experience with parallel processing, so I can't really comment
much.  But it appears that by abandoning "dead-ends" near the root, you are
talking about a very selective searcher, not full-width.  Or do you equate
"dead-ends" with cutoffs?

Will



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