On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 10:09 AM, terry mcintyre <[email protected]>wrote:
> Any particular instance of a program will probably fail to scale - > especially against humans who share the lessons of experience. > That is complete nonsense. How are you backing this up? What proof do you have that computers don't play better on better hardware? Why are the top programs being run on clusters and multi-core computers? Are the authors just complete idiots? Every bit of evidence we have says they are scaling very well against humans. That has also been our experience in game after game, not just in Go. I apologize for being so harsh on this, but you are too smart to be saying such dumb things. > Among a bunch of high-dan players, several will become expert at defeating > the current generation of programs. > That statement is out of context here. Yes, it's true but it doesn't have anything to do with scalability. > However, programs are not static; programmers also share the lessons of > experience, and develop newer, smarter, and more scalable programs. > That is true, but like your previous statement doesn't seem to make a point in the context of a scalability discussion. Are you just saying that if the program is smarter it will scale better? Yes, I agree with that completely. > > It's an arms race, and the race is not to those with the fastest CPUs, but > to the smartest programmers, programs, and players. > Saying that is not about hardware but about smart software is a tired and worn out cliche that has only has meaning when applied in the proper context. If you have a weak and stupid program your statement is painfully obvious, but in the real world of competitive programs it means everything. In chess it turns out that software and hardware have been equal contributers to performance. People used to believe that programs have not advanced and that it's all about the incredible hardware advance of the last 40 years but nothing could be farther from the truth. Programs only 10 years old pretty much suck compared to our best programs of today, regardless of hardware. In 10 years we will laugh at todays go programs. They will be a lot smarter and they will run on much better hardware and they will be many stones stronger than today. I suspect that the software will be a much bigger contributer to this than in chess but (assuming "Moores law" continues) the hardware contribution will be impressive too. And I think there is synergy here too, better software will greatly improve the search, making additional hardware look even better. I think this is where everyone goes "stupid." We should not be separating hardware and software in our minds, they are both critical and synergistic (I hate that word but it works here.) One of the big advances of computer chess was realizing that you could simulate faster hardware by making the software much more efficient. So the search was engineered so that a million stupid things that take time unnecessarily were removed from the programs. We got hash tables (it's stupid to do work when it was done before), null move pruning (it's stupid to search when your position is hopeless), and many various ways to (favorably) trade some risk for extra depth. And many other much smarter things too. And then we figured out what the search was not very good at and what it was good at and thus improved the evaluation function in ways that mattered. The result is that a modern program can beat a 15 year old program with 100 to 1 hardware advantage. That is going to happen in GO too, perhaps not quite as dramatically but let's wait and see. Perhaps we should have a match with the current best go program and the first publicly available Mogo, a program that was then incredibly impressive? What do you think would happen? Don > > Terry McIntyre <[email protected]> > > Unix/Linux Systems Administration > Taking time to do it right saves having to do it twice. > > _______________________________________________ > Computer-go mailing list > [email protected] > http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go >
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