Aye I wont discredit the power that can be obtained, just how much. Hydra is an interesting beast, but even it with all of it's dedicated FPGA's still has lost to Rybka which ran on a regular computer.
I'd still like to see someone write a go evalutation function for an FPGA though. -Josh On 3/6/07, terry mcintyre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(chess) Hydra, built with 64 Intel Xeons and a number of FPGAs - possibly 64 or 128, "has so far no loss on record against an unaided human player in over-the-board play." FPGA clock speeds may seem unimpressive, but when you have hundreds of processors working in tandem, executing a large unit of work every cycle, the combined results can be quite impressive. However, these beasties are not really programmed, from what I have read; they are designed. FPGAs are closer to computer circuitry than to programmable computers. On the other hand, there is at least one effort to develop a sort of programming language/compiler for FPGAs. http://www.xilinx.com/publications/xcellonline/xcell_53/xc_hydra53.htm goes into considerable detail. According to the author, each FPGA engine performs a position evaluation in 9 cycles which would require 2000 on a pentium; there are many such engines on each FPGA array, operating in parallel. As for video cards, providing one can map the algorithm to the parallel hardware, one may also see considerable speedups. Of course, that three-letter word "map" hides a good bit of intellectual heavy lifting. Terry McIntyre ----- Original Message ---- From: Joshua Shriver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: computer-go <computer-go@computer-go.org> Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2007 6:15:32 AM Subject: Re: [computer-go] Go hardware? I've always been fascinated with things like this, especially FPGA boards. Though from every article or post I've read concerning (at least chess) and things like FPGA, video cards... the bug speed is to slow to really be effective. -Josh On 3/5/07, Chris Fant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Maybe this would make a good Go card: > > http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/nvidia-ships-128core-graphics-cards-for-highend-film-editors-graphics-pros-apple-excited-241478.php > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > computer-go@computer-go.org > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ > _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ ________________________________ Finding fabulous fares is fun. Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
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