Dave Dyer wrote: > All these things were well understood by about 1950 and there > have been only incremental improvements > since then. The main improvement has been that computers are thousands > of times faster than when these techniques were developed.
This is a serious misrepresentation. Since 1951 (Turing's chess program) until today, chess software has improved about 1400 ELO. This number can be gotten fairly accurately because people reimplemented the original program from 1951 to run on todays hardware. Using an improvement of 70 ELO per doubling of speed [1], we get a result that software improvement is equal to about 20 doublings, or a factor of 1 MILLION. Obviously, getting the equivalent of 1 000 000 times faster hardware through software improvement counts for something too. It probably won't be too far off of the hardware improvement from the mid 50's till now, meaning hardware and software contributed equally. [1] The most commonly accepted figure. Unfortunately it affects the results quite a bit. Putting different magic numbers won't affect the conclusion that software matters, though. -- GCP _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
