on a practical note, i think that MC is a great
idea for 9x9, and might even be a great idea as
a subset of a larger piece of code that employs
human knowledge, but that MC will never beat a
decent human at 19x19. the time/space limitations
are just too great.
Does this mean that it does not converge to optimal play when processing
power goes to infinite or do you mean that it converges from the practical
point of view much too slow?
I think an MC player with 10**10 nodes/sec is even with todays technology
possible. A system like Deep Blue with 256 special purpose hardware chips
could reach this number. (There is of course then also the question about
the parallel speedup). E.g. running with 500 MHz and using 12
clock-cycles/position gives 40 MPos/sec per chip. Hydra uses 8-9
clock-cycles per position, but the programm runs only at 55 MHz. The FPGA
chips are already dated, on the newest generation it would be >= 100 MHz.
ASICs like in Deep Blue are faster. Generally I assume that Go would run
with a higher clock-rate than in chess. The speedup in relation to a
software solution would be considerable greater, because the board is larger
and one could use the fine grained parallelism of a hardware-chip better.
One could even design a 3 GHz Go-chip, but then one has to invest about the
same amout of money like for a Pentium. This would be even for a Sheikh too
expensive. Up to 500 MHz the design costs should be within a Sheikhs budget
(unfortunately Sheiks do not even know the game of Go).
What would it mean for a 19x19 player?
What would it mean to build a 10**12 nodes/sec machine (which is with todays
technology not possible, but according to Moores law in 10 years).
Chrilly
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