On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Don Dailey <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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. >
Please read (from Darren Cook): Richard Segal (who operates Blue Fuego) has a paper on the upper limit > for scaling: > http://www.springerlink.com/content/b8p81h40129116kl/ > (Sorry, I couldn't find an author's download link for the paper; Richard > is on the Fuego list but I'm not sure he is even a lurker here.) Another paper that mentions the topic (also Fuego specific) is here: http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/ps/fuego-TCIAIG.pdf The short conclusion of these papers is that it was not worth it to scale Fuego to a IBM/BlueGene machine (original purpose of the work), as it didn't get any better anymore, i.e., performance didn't (appreciably) scale beyond 512 or so cores. Obviously, that's still a big improvement from a desktop pc, but far from the capacity of the supercomputer available. Zen also has a similar issue according to its co-author Kideko Kato. That's evidence enough for me to indicate that there indeed is an issue with the current breed of programs. It appears that current specific implementations have a scaling ceiling. I expect, as expressed by multiple people here, that once that ceiling gets close enough to become a limitation, people will change their algorithms accordingly and scaling will continue. But it will only happen once you can comfortably test the program in that resource regime. René
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