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Subject: Re: IBM's latest monster

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 13:07:36 12/07/99

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On December 07, 1999 at 15:25:11, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On December 07, 1999 at 14:31:17, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On December 07, 1999 at 09:02:37, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On December 06, 1999 at 15:33:03, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>On December 06, 1999 at 13:00:56, Georg v. Zimmermann wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>>A thousand fold increase would be
>>>>>>what, an additional 6 ply search in the same time?
>>>>>
>>>>>Lets do some math. 40^x = 1000,  40log 1000 = x, x = 10log1000 / 10log40, x =
>>>>>3/10log40 = 3 / 1.5 = 1.9
>>>>>
>>>>>I think it gets you "1.9 ply" deeper if you do brute force. Now we need someone
>>>>>to tell us how much that is if you add HT and other modern wunder drugs.
>>>>>But I would be very very suprised if you'd reach +6ply.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>DB has an effective branching factor of roughly 6, about the same as Cray
>>>>Blitz, which didn't use R=2/recursive null move.  Log6(1000) is at most 4,
>>>>so it would get about 4 plies deeper.  Certainly nothing to sneeze at...
>>>
>>>see different post of me. DB may be happy with a b.f. from 10.33
>>>
>>>>But then again, this math is really wrong, because for each cpu, DB used
>>>>16 chess processors.  Each chess processor could search about 2.4M nodes per
>>>>second (they used almost 500 for DB2 the last match).  With one million
>>>>processors, they would then have 16M chess processors, and would be
>>>>searching about 40,000,000,000,000 nodes per second.  At about 1 billion
>>>>(max) for DB2, this would be 40,000 times faster.  and log6(40000) is 6,
>>>>so they could hit about 6 plies deeper.  Very dangerous box...
>>>
>>>the more processors the smaller the speedup. just attaching all processors
>>>to the search might take a few minutes.
>>>
>>>Note that HSU writes that they got very close to 1 billion positions a
>>>second but never hit the magic 1 billion positions a second number.
>>>
>>>Vincent
>>
>>
>>Sure....  hitting 1B is not easy when you have _just enough_ chess processors
>>to peak at 1B.  But to hit 1B requires perfect speed-matching between the
>>chess processors and the SP, which doesn't happen.  I think he said that the
>>chess processors were running at about 70% of max speed because of this.  And
>>he also claims 30% efficiency (in a linear way) in his parallel search.  Which
>>means that no matter how many processors he adds, he gets about 30% of each one.
>>
>>As far as branching factor, he uses normal alpha/beta, so I have no idea where
>>you would get 10+.
>
>See a post some higher.
>
>axb5 was a fail low. way over 3 minutes.
>
>800M * 180 seconds = 144 * 10^9 nodes.
>11th root out of that is 10.33
>
>simple nah?
>
>but the reason why is obvious:
>   - normal alpha beta without good move ordering is a crime
>   - no hashtables
>   - in the normal search DB did a lot of extensions
>     blowing up the search. extensions especially blow up the
>     search if you don't nullmove.
>   - i don't believe his 30% claim unless he was minimaxing.
>
>Vincent


1.  your math doesn't work.. because you have _no_ idea how many nodes it takes
him to search a 10 ply tree.  Effective branching factor = 11 ply time / 10 ply
time.  Anything else is a pure guess.  I see nothing that they do that would
drive the EBF beyond sqrt(38) which is roughly what alpha/beta is supposed to
be.

2.  Move ordering that they do is very similar to ours...  Particularly in the
software (first 8 plies + all the extensions).  Move ordering in the hardware is
more simplistic of course, using MVV/LVA to sort captures.

3.  They have hashing in software... but not in hardware.  The hardware supports
hashing, but he lacked time to design/build a big multi-port memory for each
group of 16 cpus...

4.  I believe anything he says until I see evidence that he is misleading
everyone.  So far it hasn't happened.  They did a lot of testing and the
30% seemed pretty accurate.  Not good, of course...  but 30% of 512 is still
a huge speed-up...



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