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Subject: Re: The art of debate

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 16:19:26 01/27/00

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On January 27, 2000 at 17:37:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>The cray is a GP machine.  The Xeon is a GP machine.  At equal clock periods,
>the Cray is roughly 200 times faster.  If you had asked me beforehand, I would
>not have guessed that...

You're contradicting yourself. In one breath, you say that Hsu picked some
arbitrary high number. In the next breath, you're saying that number might be
super-optimized, vectorized Cray assembly instructions. That's like saying Hsu
made his arbitrary HIGH number as LOW as he possibly could. It makes absolutely
no sense.

Here's the other thing that makes no sense: if Hsu just picked some high number,
why didn't he make it higher? He picked some number that is definitely feasable
on a fast PC. Instead, he could have just as easily made it 10 times bigger, and
I wouldn't even be having this debate with you.

I simply can't accept the fact that his estimate is arbitrary. There's just no
reason to.

>Not at all.  I don't think "the number" is important.  I think the "bigness"
>is...

Right, I don't care that it's EXACTLY 40k. It might as well be 20k or 80k
(similar "bigness"). The point is that all of these are possible on a PC.

>To an extent.  But I can answer that with one AND.  How many for a non-bitboard
>program?  Wouldn't the non-bitboarder and I come up with _different_ estimates
>for the same thing.  And wouldn't we _both_ be right?  And wrong?

It doesn't matter HOW he thought he could compute the term, only only matters
that it's POSSIBLE.

Another possibility is that he wrote a function that did similar work to DB's
evaluation function. It might produce total garbage, and not use any of the
"correct" weights, but it would have "some of these terms" and "some of those
terms" and he could draw conclusions from it.

You seem to accept everything Hsu says as gospel, except for this ONE estimate.
You're coming up with every excuse to invalidate this statistic, even to the
point of suggesting that it's an arbitrary big number. Why? Don't you have some
faith in Hsu and his work and what he writes? Maybe it IS a hard estimate to
make, but isn't it possible that he went about it in an intelligent way?

-Tom



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