I am surprised you were asked to pay for the paper, I was not asked to pay
for the download (that's why I felt okay to provide the link).

>From the conclusion:
"We first analyzed the single-threaded scaling of Fuego and found that there
is an upper bound on the play-quality improvements that can come
from additional search. This in itself limits the potential advantage of
Blue Gene/P as its total processing power in a one-hour timed game easily
exceeds the computation needed to maximize Fuego’s overall play quality."

René

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 10:35 AM, Don Dailey <[email protected]> wrote:

> First of all,  I never purchase papers of unknown quality.   If I know a
> paper is great or that it comes highly recommended by someone I trust I will
> purchase it although the idea of purchasing papers in general is distasteful
> to me.
>
> The scalability issue as you summarize has to do with the number of cores -
> I am not surprised that more cores bring less improvement and that is true
> in ALL games.    That's not the issue I am talking about here although it's
> certain a legitimate practical issue.
>
> To better understand the issue,  forget about the specific machine it's on
> and substitute the phrase "scale with time."
>
> There is no scaling issue with reasonably written programs that can be
> tested with current hardware.    Showing that it's difficult to parallelize
> an algorithm that is basically serial does not prove anything here.
>
> I have explained why people believe MCTS may have limits and why they are
> wrong.   All such "evidence" that we have hit some wall is anecdotal.
> Unless of course you know of someone who has run a few thousands games at 1
> day per move on a single core machine (or equivalent.)
>
> Don
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 1:12 PM, René van de Veerdonk <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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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