On 19/09/2011 19:21, Petr Baudis wrote:
On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 11:33:20AM -0400, steve uurtamo wrote:
I guess the question is what do we want to
identify: the strongest program or the strongest artificial playing
entity?
I'm starting to be convinced that there's very little difference. Code
isn't generally separable from its hardware, once it has been heavily
optimized. This has been discussed on the list before, but I'll just
point out that if you want to have a competition between *algorithms*,
you'd need a very artificial environment that you might have
difficulty getting everyone to agree upon.
I'd like to chip in with a concrete example - relative strength of Fuego
vs. Pachi seems to heavily depend on the amount of computing power.
On single CPU, Fuego is much stronger than Pachi, they get about even
with 4 CPUs and from there on, Pachi scales better and quickly gets
significantly stronger. (Details to follow in our ACG13 paper.)
Of course we could spend a lot of effort on tweaking Pachi to play
well on lower-end platforms, but I'd rather be looking for the next
algorithmic breakthrough and be ready for the many-core computers
of tomorrow. We should think what do we want to measure in the contest.
If no remote play is allowed anyway, I think the playing field should
be at least set really even by all players using the same hardware
platform, e.g. like it was done in Tampere. Restricting remote play
but still allowing for differentiation based on whatever laptop one
brings in does not make too much sense to me.
My recollection of Tampere is that standard hardware was provided, but
entrants could bring their own hardware if they wanted. Indeed one
entrant did so.
I am not saying that this is a better way, just that it was how we did
it in Tampere.
Nick
--
Nick Wedd
[email protected]
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