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Subject: Re: new computer chess effort

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 18:08:16 12/16/99

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On December 15, 1999 at 18:53:11, Greg Lindahl wrote:

>On December 15, 1999 at 17:57:07, Amir Ban wrote:
>
>> You should study this problem more seriously and then look for people
>> who can assist you on your missing skills.
>
>Funny, that's what I thought I was doing.
>
>-- g


But you are going about it wrong.  First step:  enumerate _all_ the problems
that have to be solved...  both the easy ones _and_ the hard ones.  I have
tried to explain some difficulties.  But you seem to want to take this as
some sort of criticism of the idea.  Remember that I have written several
computer chess programs.  Doing it in a high-level language is _not_ a simple
project.  Doing it in hardware is a much more complex problem.  And is going to
require some solutions to problems that don't exist in a software-type program.

I studied the Belle design carefully when Ken described it in a couple of
publications.  What he did was complex.  Hsu improved Ken's design and reduced
it to a single chip.  And I have seen what he did to make that work.  It is
non-trivial.

I've tried to explain some severe problems that FPGAs are going to have, when
you set about to design a chess engine that fits on a single chip.  The problems
are _enormous_.  But _not_ impossible, possibly, although a single-chip FPGA
engine is definitely impossible IMHO.  But perhaps a single-board PCI-type card
might hold a couple of FPGA-based chess engines with the necessary support
hardware to provide registers, memory, stacks, etc...

It's an interesting problem to discuss.  But if you tend to take every problem
that is pointed out as a personal attack, it isn't going very far.  Folks have
pointed out _many_ flaws in Crafty's code over the years.  I try to fix them.
The same approach has to be taken here, or this is not worth discussing...

IE if I am going to build a robot to perform surgery, I am _definitely_ going to
listen to a MD that explains certain very tedius things that must be done right,
even if some of them seem nearly impossible to implement.  I want to know about
the big hurdles _early_.  Not after a couple of years worth of work...

just my $.02...



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