Author: Peter Kappler
Date: 19:25:42 01/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 20, 2000 at 19:41:12, Dann Corbit wrote:
>On January 20, 2000 at 12:15:33, Peter Kappler wrote:
>[snip]
>>I'd expect DB2 to win, but I think it would be closer than people expect. It
>>certainly wouldn't blow the micros off the board.
>
>But we are talking about old technology verses new.
>
>Consider {back to the present}:
>The fastest incarnations of RS/6000 do 3+ teraflops. That's 3,000 gigaflops or
>3,000,000 megaflops.
>
>The new Hsu chips are much faster than the predecessors.
>
>Take a new RS/6000 ("fully loaded") and add as many Hsu/Campbell processor
>systems as will fit into it. It is potentially one thousand times as powerful
>as the old system.
1000 times? How did you get to this number?
> Why not? Now, add in a full complement of 8 piece tablebase
>files (calculated by that machine).
>
Huh? 8 piece? Any idea how many terabytes of disk this would require? Not to
mention the months(years?) it would take to generate the tablebases. We're just
now starting to see the first 6 piece tables, and I don't believe anybody has
ever generated a 7-piecer. Maybe a TB expert will chime in and tell us what it
would take to get to 8.
>If it were their goal, IBM, Hsu and company could make a chess machine that
>would crush a team of Kasparov + Old-Deep-Blue [Just conjecture, but I think
>that they really could do it]. Perhaps an ELO of 3500.
>
What you're describing is a machine that would score ~99% against Kasparov. I
think computer chess will *never* reach that level.
This goes back to the old debate about what ELO rating a computer would attain
if it played chess perfectly. I have always argued that this number is finite,
because I believe that the drawing margin in chess is sufficiently large to
allow one side to make a few mistkes and still draw against a perfect opponent.
But that's a whole different discussion... :-)
>A machine like that would simply be unbeatable. It could make strategic plans.
>It could analyze every move that has ever been played to a depth of 20 plies and
>store it in a database. Such a computing device would be invincible.
I think that more speed is not the answer, because at 15+ plies, you're already
faced with with seriously diminishing returns per extra ply. Any tactics that
exist in the position (or that a human would ever have a prayer of finding) have
long since been discovered, so the computer's positional evaluation starts to
become the limiting factor. And computer chess still has a long, long way to go
in that area. As you've stated yourself in other threads, the GMs are getting
better at exploiting these weaknesses.
--Peter
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