It seems to me that, there is a thread of efforts that try to improve the playing capability of GO bots by dramatically increasing playouts/sec. Now we know that FPGA, GPU, and SIMD can make much more playouts per second than single-core CPU, but all these results are based on "light" playout schemes. So everytime when these kind of results come out, people would doubt the likelihood that these designs really generate strong programs.
So my question is, Is there a "widely accepted" baseline performance to compare with for all these works? For example, we may pick a known program with "lightest" playout scheme among those frequently attending the KGS monthly. So if a high-performance design implements similar playout scheme of that program but achieves much higher playout/sec, we could reasonably expect a stronger program based on this design. Another question ... does more playouts really provide a *consistent* improvement on the ELO score, especially for those strongest programs? I remember that some programs running on laptop rank very high in the Olympaids, that seems imply that speed simply doesn't matter here ... Thanks, Bojun Huang >Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 22:23:29 +0200 >From: Antoine de Maricourt <[email protected]> >To: [email protected] >Subject: Re: [Computer-go] Direct DX11 and graphics cards for cheaper > simulation hardware? >Message-ID: [email protected]> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > >> Despite the challenges using it in a tree, and the contentious issue of >> whether light playouts can make a really strong program, I think this is >> interesting research. By 1.6 times quicker than libego, do you mean as >> it runs on the CPU? Or is this a simulated speed as if it was running on >> the GPU? I think libego was the clear leader in light playout speed, so >> working out a way to do playouts even faster (if that is what you have >> done) is amazing. >I just emulated data structures and algorithms that are targeting GPU >in C++ for a CPU. 128-bit CPU's SIMD instruction set simply emulates 4 >GPU-like threads working on 32-bit registers. After several attempts >made to test various ideas, the first complete implementation had >performances similar to libego, without a simple CPU specific >optimization. I then put back some specific CPU optimizations (not >likely to be effective on GPU) + tuning and easily improved the >performances. This is really how it runs on the CPU. The same data >structure and algorithm is likely to have an even better ratio against >libego with an AVX enabled processor. > >Light playout was a beginning to start with. The random move generator >has been designed to take into account a probability distribution (with >a little slowdown) that can be derived from local pattern matching. > >Regards, > > Antoine
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