oren wrote:Mike Novack wrote:
Oh, and BTW, don't simply count cores. Try to look up "crunch benchmarks" for the machines being compared. Most of the machines being used by the top programs in these competitions aren't all that powerful.
It wouldn't be all that expensive to get a machine with 1/2-1/4 the power, so playing just a stone or so weaker. The reason for that is you only need the crunch of a powerful cpu, not all the other expensive components a server might have, like a vast array of hot swap drives, etc.
Just curious, will you never be happy until you get exact cpu model number, bios, current running temperature, operating system build rev, and quantum effects in the exact room being used?
You reply to all of these messages in the same way. Most of us can use a core count and year to get a rough idea of horsepower. You seem to need down to the hertz level for some odd reason.
If he follows chess engines at all, I can see where he's coming from. In the Chess engine sub-culture, the differences between engine strengths at the highest level might come down to 20 to 40 ELO, at a level in the 3400+ range.
For comparison, a "C" rated chess player is 1500, the Top 10 players in the world are around 2750 to 2850, the chess engines are around 3300 to 3400 ELO. So 20 or 30 ELO is statistically insignificant to a human, but apparently means a LOT to those people that are interested in chess engines. Even then, your talking about chess games where there might be an 50% or higher draw rate. Yet if an engine running on some nice rig might win an extra 1 or 2 games in a match of 100 games, those people that follow that stuff celebrate the accomplishment.
Chess is more complicated then GO, as far as the rules and piece movement, but has a fraction of the *derivatives compared to GO, so some things have been vetted out of chess engines. For example, using **Monte Carlo to run thousands of games in order to hopefully find on accident a best move doesn't work. That's also why scaling engines to use more and more cores doesn't really work. Although using more cores does work to a point. Using 64 cores compared to 32 cores gives you statistically zero gain. Because chess is an INT operation, you can't really use parallel processing, so using GPU is more or less worthless, since they don't do INT operations. Throwing a chess engine on Super Computer is all but worthless. They've even done distributed chess games which used tens of thousands of computers across the internet. Although the games were largely successful, it showed that the total increase of the distributed engine's power was fairly insignificant compared to the total resources used. -And a few years later a modern chess engines would handily beat that particular program.
*I think I read someplace a chess game has 10^50 positions and GO has 2.81*(10^170)
**Monte Carlo has been used for some effect in post game analysis, in which the analyzing program has unlimited time to compute and compare Monte Carlo lines to the actual play. But in those cases, the program isn't looking for a winning line, but merely a better reply to what was played in the actual game. If a outright mate or forced draw isn't obtained, eventually a game of chess will lose pieces until so few are left that an endgame table base can be used for perfect play and instantly the chess engine can tell you if its a win/lose/draw, and spit out the optimum move sequence.
