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Subject: Re: Who is the real NPS champion?

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 01:33:54 11/08/99

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On November 08, 1999 at 04:20:56, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>On November 08, 1999 at 04:05:45, Jouni Uski wrote:
>
>>To get the definitive(?) answer is selected 20 random middle game position from
>>ECM suite and run all 5 minutes. After that I read NPS and finally counted
>>average for program. Test was done in 450 Mhz AMD with 52 MB hash.
>>
>>Fritz5.32      510kNPS
>>Goliath2000a   610kNPS
>>
>>So Goliath has beaten Fritz in pure speed and is NPS champion!!
>>
>>Jouni
>
>Most of those positions were probably tactical ones.  I think Goliath uses some
>very lazy-eval in these types of positions, so NPS goes way up.  Try the test
>using "positional" positions, and see if this is the same result.  It may still
>be the same thing - who knows? :)
>
>Jeremiah

Why do people care?  I can understand being concerned about speed, but this
isn't speed.

Here is what I mean.

If you want to talk about race cars and how fast they go, you talk about miles
or kilometers per hour rather than RPM's.  RPM's can be increased by decreasing
the gear ratio, while also potentially *decreasing* speed.  RPM's is a nice
number, but it doesn't mean much unless you know more about the drive train.

NPS is just some number that is easy to collect.  It is not an indicator of
tactical speed, much less chess strength.

bruce





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