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Subject: Re: next deep blue

Author: Jeremiah Penery

Date: 02:06:13 01/25/00

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On January 25, 2000 at 04:35:33, David Blackman wrote:

>On January 24, 2000 at 12:20:12, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On January 24, 2000 at 09:57:58, Amir Ban wrote:
>>>"I'll bet that I have several evaluation terms that are not practical for them
>>>to compute."
>>>
>>>Amir
>>
>>
>>Let me repeat also:  "There is _nothing_ you can do in software that they can't
>>do in hardware in _far_ less time.  _absolutely nothing_."  That is the benefit
>>of doing what they did in hardware.  Never a question of "can I afford this or
>>will it slow me down too much?"  Only a question of "is this worth the time it
>>will take to design it?"
>
>I wonder if there is some stuff that you want to eval in about 1% of positions.
>You just have a quick if statement mostly, but in 1% of positions it triggers
>and you do 500 lines of code. In a software program, this costs you very little
>except RAM, which is cheap.

If you do 200k NPS, 1% of that is still 2000.  So you're running 500 extra lines
of code 2000x/sec.  And if you put several of these things in, you'll probably
end up doing it at least 10-20K x/sec.  This is going to slow you down quite a
bit.  You'll no longer be doing 200k NPS, for sure. :)

>In hardware, it costs you for chip area and partly for power, even for those 99%
>of positions that don't use it.
>
>If i was doing hardware, i'd avoid most of these. In software, i'd put them in
>if i had the time and the knowledge.
>
>I can't think of any good examples right now, but i'm sure the slow/smart
>brigade use plenty of them.

If you were making a machine to play against arguably the best chessplayer
_ever_, would you want to risk _not_ putting them in, just to avoid some extra
chip area/heat, when you could mis-evaluate something and lose a game?



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