Well, Amen! As Don Dailey said, researchers probably would have concluded that
MC was not worth doing, if they had been using the computers of ten or fifteen
years back.
Looking forward, computer power equivalent to that rig lashed together with 8
PS3s or GPUs or FPGAs, or some combination thereof, will be available on your
desktop in ten or fifteen years. Last year, a quadcore cost about $800; this
year, the price is about half that. Intel and AMD roadmaps show 6- and 8-core
computers coming soon. Apple is working on Open CL, which could it make it
easier to tap the GPU. Tesla GPU boards are within the budget of many
researchers. The algorithms which best exploit the power of large clusters -
especially of non-von Neumann architectures - have yet to be discovered.
I'm glad researchers are experimenting with funky clusters to improve Go
programs. Lots of variation and selective pressure can only improve the state
of the art. If somebody wins all the tournaments, others must tweak their
parameters and optimize their code to stay in the game.
David Fotland recently spent six months doing a great deal of work to improve
Many Faces of Go, grafting MC-based code to his traditional-style engine. His
program advanced four or five kyu. If MC programs were not winning
competitions, would he have put in all that time and effort? Mr Fotland is now
tweaking his program to scale well on n>32 processors - could he be thinking
about Moore's Law bringing manycore computers within reach of more and more
enthusiasts within a decade? The Mogo team and others are likewise using as
much computer power as they can; more power to them!
IBM once spent a million dollars to build Deep Blue, which beat Kasparov in
the game of Chess. Today, I suspect that an "ordinary" quadcore with a top
program could play as well. Here's hoping that, in a decade or two, our newest
desktops play a pro-level game of Go.
I'm hoping that some research departments think of these projects as a good way
to train today's students to wrap their brains around the task of developing
for manycore architectures.
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