On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 14:51 -0800, terry mcintyre wrote: > > From: Don Dailey <drdai...@cox.net> > > > > On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 14:22 -0800, terry mcintyre wrote: > > > In my experience with IT systems administration, people do tend to let > > > the hardware do the heavy lifting when algorithmic improvements could > > > double and quadruple the performance. We don't know much about the > > > space of useful algorithms; if we focus on some particular algorithm, > > > we may only be able to wring a few percent out of it, where some > > > better algorithm could possibly yield 50% or 75% reduction in run > > > time. We are looking for higher peaks on a mountain range enshrouded > > > by a heavy fog of uncertainty. > > > > That may be true of IT system administrators, but game developers > > writing extremely high performance game playing programs like Go and > > Chess don't think like that at all. They do not blow off even minor > > performance improvements. They salivate when new hardware comes out, > > and it's not because they can switch over to slower algorithms or use > > higher level languages. To these kind of people that would be like > > buying a brand new Lamborghini for driving to the grocery store. > > A more apt analogy might be driving that brand new Lamborghini the long and > twisty way around the country, instead of using a more direct route, given > that you don't have an accurate map. You're going faster, but not getting as > much speedup as possible. We're a long way from knowing the best possible > algorithms to solve this problem. We may even need to make radical revisions > to take advantage of totally different architectures. If, for example, > large-scale memristor networks are developed, we might find that they can do > an amazing amount of work compared to von Neumann architectures. We might > stop thinking of "CPUs" and "memory" as separate entities.
It is true that we don't know the best possible algorithm for solving this problem, but that has nothing to do with letting the hardware do the heavy lifting. What I'm saying is that High Performance game developers are totally focused on squeezing as much performance as possible out of the software. I don't just mean brute force power but every kind of elegant performance improvement. I don't like your Lamborghini analogy. My analogy was designed to be about waste, taking something beautiful and using it in some mundane way. Maybe my point would have been clearer if I had said that I was buying a brand new Lamborghini to haul cow manure instead of using my work truck. Your analogy is about enjoying the machine for what it was intended for. So if you gave me a computer 50X faster than what I have now, I could rewrite Lazarus in Ruby instead of C and it would run roughly like it does now. I don't view that as a very intelligent use of such a hypothetical and wonderful machine. - Don > > > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > computer-go@computer-go.org > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
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