> On Mon, 2008-08-11 at 20:39 -0700, David Fotland wrote: >> Uct also has the advantage that it is much easier to use with multiple >> CPUs. I know parallel alpha-beta exists, but my evaluation function is >> not designed to be thread safe. If I put a big lock around it, there >> will be almost no SMP scaling, since almost all the time is in the >> evaluation, not in the search. > > This is not the case with alpha-beta. With additional processors, > alpha-beta always does wasted work, and the more processors the more > wasted work. It still always benefits from additional CPU's.
I don't see how anything you said relates to what David said. Aside from that, it's not theorethically necessary for alpha-beta to do wasted work (although it will in practise), and more CPUs can make the program worse on any practical architecture (mostly due to locking and memory bandwidth). I think any argument which is based on a state-of-the-art alpha-beta searcher being different from a state-of-the-art UCT searcher will run into severe problems sooner rather than later. -- GCP _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
