Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 13:23:47 01/21/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 21, 2000 at 15:10:32, Robert Hyatt wrote: >After creating "cray blitz" I found it difficult to think about trying to >write a program for a Micro. And it took a lot of time/effort to do so. After >building DB, it would take Hsu a lot of time/effort to try to write a program >for a Cray, and then more time/effort to think about a PC-based program. Well, presumably he wasn't an idiot and wrote the SP program in something portable. Then all he would have to do is write a quiescence search function and port the DB evaluation function. After designing the function in hardware, remaking it in software should seem positively trivial. He already knows all the terms anyway. How long could it possibly take? Definitely less than a week for a "first draft," I would guess. Here's another thing I was just thinking about. DB had a "fast eval" that took 3 cycles, and the full eval took something like 11 cycles. Most of the time, the fast eval was good enough. Presumably the 40,000 instructions that he reported was for the full-blown, 11 cycle eval. Here is my best guess at how fast a DB program would run on a PIII. Assume 75% of the time it takes 11k instructions to eval, and 25% of the time, it takes 40k. So that's an average of 18k. Now, figuring that the PIII almost always retires 1.5 instructions per clock cycle, it takes 12k clock cycles per node. Now assume you're running at 800MHz. That's 66000 NPS, and it's still being fairly conservative (with the 75%). That strikes me as a perfectly reasonable speed; if I'm not mistaken, some strong micro programs run that fast on the same hardware. As for putting in the effort to make such a program, I think that's a no-brainer too. Imagine how much money he could make off of selling the DB program for PCs. A million people would want a copy, the first day it's announced. And it wouldn't even matter how strong it is. He could just write on the back of the box, "This program runs 3000 times faster on the official DB hardware!" and everybody will think it's terrific. Maybe you can think of a reason why he hasn't done this already... -Tom
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.