On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 09:18 -0200, Mark Boon wrote: > My understanding of the PlayStation is that it's a Cell architecture, > with one main CPU and six auxilary processing units with limited > capability. Of course you don't need much for something to do MC > playouts, so it seems a very suitable architecture. So 8 PS3s gives a > total of 56 CPU's. Plus the four of the desktop that would make 60. > > I have mixed feelings about this piling up of hardware. On the one > hand it's exciting. Complex parallel processing to improve the level > of play is very interesting. On the other hand, I hope attention > doesn't only go towards putting more computing power together.
Here is how I look at it. We probably wouldn't even have monte-carlo programs if hardware was like it was 30 years ago, or even 10 years ago. A few months ago I was thinking about why it took us so long to discover this Monte Carlo thing and then I realized that it couldn't have happened until recent times. Although it may have been POSSIBLE 10 or 15 years ago to produce something that was similar in strength to what was available, you probably need significant overkill before it seems interesting enough for developers to start experimenting with. So if someone 15 years ago, armed with the same ideas we have now, had started developing such a program, it's likely they would have concluded that it's not feasible. It took quite a bit of discovery and effort to get real strong programs. Lazarus, for example is stronger that the old traditional programs by far on small boards on todays hardware, but had I developed Lazarus on my old pentium 133 I would have come to the tentative conclusion (I never say never) that this was probably another bad idea. Computer chess is another interesting example, because we used the same basic approach back then as we use today. But 40 years ago the conclusion was that search doesn't really work - it won by default because we didn't know anything better. The call went out to abandon this brain dead approach and persuasive arguments were presented (based on the laws of physics and the number of electrons in the universe) that it could never work. So I think we have to embrace the fact that hardware is a part of these kinds of advancements. In fact I have always believe this anyway, the whole idea behind computing is to perform simple and stupid operations very very quickly. It's easy to forget that everything about computing and what is possible is tied to the power of the hardware. There is another school of thought that I somewhat subscribe to and I think you are alluding to, that we have been spoiled by the power and do not look for the most efficient way to do things. I know and agree that this happens, but this is more of an engineering issue. As engineers we must use some imagination because ultimately you need as much imagination and power (both) as possible. This is another angle on the high level language argument, that computers are so fast that it's ok if the software it 20 times slower (which is typical for many high level languages.) I think that has always been an asinine concept because there is never enough computing power to accomplish what you want unless you have a limited imagination. I call this the drunken sailor philosophy (on payday, the sailor wastes his whole paycheck for a single night of instant gratification.) - Don > > Mark > > > On 15-dec-08, at 08:23, Darren Cook wrote: > > >> Advertisement: Fudo Go used a desktop pc (Intel Q9550) and _eight_ > >> Playstation 3 consoles on a private Gigabit Ethernet LAN. > > > > Hello Kato-sensei, > > Are you able to use all 8 cores of the playstation? So, with the 4 of > > the Q9550, 68 cores altogether? Do you, or your students, have any > > papers on the hardware challenges/solutions? > > > > Darren > > > > -- > > Darren Cook, Software Researcher/Developer > > http://dcook.org/mlsn/ (English-Japanese-German-Chinese-Arabic > > open source dictionary/semantic network) > > http://dcook.org/work/ (About me and my work) > > http://dcook.org/blogs.html (My blogs and articles) > > _______________________________________________ > > computer-go mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ > > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
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