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

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 18:37:43 12/20/99

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On December 20, 1999 at 19:40:41, Greg Lindahl wrote:

>On December 20, 1999 at 19:25:17, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>He is talking about the hash table.  If you punt on that, you take a huge hit
>>in performance.  The only way to make it up is to do dozens of chess processors
>>like DB used.  This is assuming that the chess processor is really doing a true
>>alpha/beta search, and not just pieces of this (like evaluation).
>
>Again, you're making the assumption that you have to put the hash table on the
>chip or not use it at all. That isn't necessary; you could put just the
>evaluation function onto the chip, and do the hash lookup on the main processor.
>In order for that to be interesting, the evaluation function has to be a large %
>of total time, which is true for some existing computer algorithms (but not
>Crafty.)

Crafty's eval is 50% of the total time.  Nobody is over 90% of total time in
eval.  So there isn't a lot of room for improvement there.  The problem that
you may be overlooking is this:  Suppose a very fast program (fritz) searches
300K nodes per second with almost no eval.  Your hardware won't help much.
Suppose another program searches at 30K with 90% of the time spent in eval.
You speed that program up to almost 300K.  That isn't enough to make a huge
difference, particularly when someone can compile on other platforms (like
the 21264) and get a big boost there as well...



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