Author: Peter McKenzie
Date: 17:26:02 09/30/99
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On September 30, 1999 at 14:35:25, Charles Unruh wrote: > > In the past i thought faster hardware would benefit slow searchers like >Chessmaster more than fast searchers like Fritz. Now i'm more inclined to >believe that it makes more sense that faster hardware benefits fast searchers >more. For the reason that positional ideas are for the most parts moves made >from practical experience/knowledge, that we can't always quite calculate. >However, faster hardware gives programs the ability in many instances to >actually be able to calculate the result. So although i think Chessmaster is a >truly awesome engine especially against programs running up to 233Mhz I expct >that on a P450Mhz it will come in 3rd or 4th. This isn't a simple question. My basic take on the issue is that programs that sacrifice some speed (in terms of NPS) in return for a better evaluation will do better as hardware speed increases and/or time controls get longer. The basic premise behind this argument is that an extra ply of search depth becomes less important at greater depths, so at greater depths the evaluation function becomes a more important factor. So if a 2 ply gnuchess search scores X% vs a 1 ply crafty search, and a 10 ply gnuchess search scores Y% vs a 9 ply crafty search, then I would expect X to be larger than Y. It would be an interesting experiment. This is a pretty interesting area, although I'm not aware of any conclusive evidence to support my beliefs. I think that the results of LambChop at Paderborn WCCC support what I'm saying (small sample though), as LambChop is relatively slow and was often being out searched by 1 or 2 ply but this didn't seem to matter very much because Chop was usually getting 10 ply so it wasn't falling for too many tactical tricks. I think it would have done worse in a blitz tournament :-) However your original question is complicated by the following: - slower program don't always have more knowledge than faster ones - some of the knowledge of slower programs goes into changing the shape of the search tree, which complicates the issue. - some searches scale better when run on faster hardware, while others blow up because of too many extensions etc. Its an interesting area. cheers, Peter
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