Author: Jeremiah Penery
Date: 10:51:47 01/23/00
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On January 23, 2000 at 13:17:01, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >On January 23, 2000 at 12:52:29, Albert Silver wrote: >>In hardware, I could be considered at best as an enlightened know-nothing, so I >>won't pretend to be entering the argument here. I'm curious though. Is the SP >>really no different from a PC except that it is bigger (and faster)? I mean take > >In terms of running a chess program, the SP is the same as several PCs connected >by an insanely fast network. > >DB was an SP, but it also had a few hundred custom chips for computer chess. >Each chip ran ~3,600 times faster than a general-purpose CPU. > >Here's the issue at hand: The DB _algorithm_ can be implemented in software and >run on a PC. It would be on the order of 10,000 times slower, but it would still You think it could get 200k NPS on a PC? >do exactly the same stuff. (And it turns out that 10,000 times slower is still >fast enough to play a good game of chess.) If you do _only_ the evaluation, you might get such a number. You still also have to do all the rest of the program in software, which will make you even slower. The DB evaluation probably depended on a relatively large search depth, as well. With all the extensions and stuff they were doing (and no forward pruning), and a gigantic q-search, their search depth would be _pathetic_ on said PC. Not only would it get tactically killed by this, the evaluation may just be wrong at low depths.
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