Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: FPGAs playing chess--an expert opinion

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 17:00:17 12/19/99

Go up one level in this thread


Depending on your point of view, every chess program spends 100% of its time
doing alpha-beta searching. But if you break it down into move generation,
evaluation, etc., then alpha-beta is only a small fraction of that. So if you
can speed up everything else, you're really getting somewhere.

The Deep Blue chips, despite all of the resources at hand, only worked with one
position at a time. If they were restricted to one position, an FPGA design will
definitely have the same restriction.

The easy solution is to get a lot of FPGAs. =)

-Tom

On December 19, 1999 at 07:13:46, Dan Andersson wrote:
>I knew that, but the alphabeta search will dominate timewise. As you know fast
>movegeneration is exactly as important as fast primitive operations in a general
>purpose microprocessor. Fast is good but it doesnt mean algoritms will cange
>O(n). FYI I built gameplaying machines using RAM, EEPROM, ROM, TTY and whatnot
>using a soldering iron fifteen years ago. Kalaha and Reversi mainly.
>
>Regards Dan Andersson



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.