Author: Ed Schröder
Date: 00:54:48 11/23/99
Go up one level in this thread
>Posted by Christophe Theron on November 22, 1999 at 18:25:35: > >>>Was it better than Sargon II, or just equal? >> >>It was better because Sargon was outplayed by search depth in most >>cases. In that days Rebel was able to look 6 plies deep all very selective >>and much holes involved but very effective playing a program thinking >>just 4 plies deep. > >6 plies on a TRS-80 in the time Sargon took to compute 4? > >I have the old Sargon II for TRS-80 manual just in front of me. A green manual: >"Hayden computer program tapes, Sargon II: A computer chess program by Dan and >Kathe Spracklen". I have kept it as a souvenir (I also have the cassette, >but I don't dare to open the box). > >The manual says that it took 6 minutes (average) to compute to ply depth 4. > >You are saying that in 6 minutes you were able to compute to ply depth 6 on a >TRS-80??? 6 plies indeed all very selective but a friend of mine had doubled the processor speed from 1.77 Mhz to 3.5 Mhz. On standard 1.77 Mhz Rebel on 40/120 was only able to compute 4 plies and some moves on 6 plies. The first Rebel was a strange animal. I had to re-invent the wheel completely as I had no access to documentation, I wasn't even aware documentation existed. No alpha/beta, no windows, no Q-search, the program could only think in steps of 2 plies. Thus 2,4,6,8 etc. >If I had known that at that time, I would have immediately given up chess >programming. My TRS-80 was able to compute 3 plies in 6 minutes, and I was >disgusted by Sargon's 4 plies in the same time. Not to talk about Sargon's >superior evaluation... I agree, Sargon's evaluation was the best of all. >>>>In the past I have written an Apple IIE emulator for the PC. >>> >>>That's incredible! Did you write it just to run a 6502 Rebel with more >>>comfort, or did you make a standalone product of this emulator? >> >>The emulator was only meant to work for my convenience improving >>Rebel. No Apple 2E hard disk, keyboard or screen support, it only >>emulated my engine. > > >You mean you were able to run your 6502 binaries on the PC I suppose? I used a PC 6502 cross compiler to generate the binary then my emulator directly executed the 6502 code. >>It was not used very much as the so-called "dedicated computer" market >>collapsed after the introduction of the 80486 as then it was the first >>time producers like Mephisto, Fidelity and Saitek couldn't compete anymore >>regarding raw processor speed as the 486 definitely was superior to the >>chips they were using. >> >>The only exception was TASC who came with the ChessMachine concept and >>therefore was able to compete a bit longer but then when the Pentium >>90 came the hardware superiority once and for all was decided in favor >>of the PC. >> >>Summarizing my conversions: >>- TRS80 (basic) >>- TRS80 (assembler) >>- APPLE 2E (assembler) >>- ARM RISC (assembler) >>- PC (C++) >>- PC (assembler) >> >>Every stage was about 1.5 - 2 years before I was pleased with the results. >> >>I wonder what is next. The upcoming 64-bit of Intel? > > >Porting to C to take advantage of all the optimizations the modern >compilers can offer I assume. > > > >>>> I can run and old >>>>6502 Rebel on the PC. It's a super fast emulator, speed loss not more than >>>>a factor 2-3 if I remember well. At that time I used it for a while to >improve >>>>my 6502 engines because a 386 20 Mhz was much more comfortable than the >>>>Apple IIE at 2 Mhz. >>>> >>>>If I can dig up the thing in 2010 I will give you a very hard time :) >>> >>>At that time you'll have a 1GHz Apple IIe. >>> >>>Check your sources. It would be sad to see you resigning because you get a >>>stack overflow after a 20 plies search! :) >> >>Worse, 16 plies maximum and no hash tables :( > > >What happened after 16 plies? Just a static evaluation of the position. In these days Q-search was unknown for me. It was not a big deal, on a TRS-80 3.5 Mhz Rebel on 40/120 was doing 6 plies and some interesting moves even hit 8 plies. 10 plies was out of the question. Ed >>>Be warned that I could have a 2GHz TRS-80 on my side, loaded with 48Kb RAM. >>>That's a serious client! :) >> >>No! >> >>I will ask Jeroen to edit the Tiger book a bit :) > > >Pah... Maybe you don't even need to do that... > > > > Christophe
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