On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 2:23 PM, René van de Veerdonk <
[email protected]> wrote:

> 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).


It's probably avaialable from inside a university,  but not from your home.
   Any site with the "SpringerLink"  url  is going to ask me to subscribe to
buy the paper.    I am not a subscriber.

What is really annoying is the PDF link which looks just like a normal PDF
download.    You click on it and you get the sales pitch - to buy this paper
(actually,  you are only buying online access to it)  for  USD 24.95.     No
thanks.   I like to read and would go broke quickly if I read everything
that I wanted to read.

Don



>
> 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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>>>
>>
>>
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