Had rules like this been in affect in earlier years, where you limit participants to commodity hardware, we would have never seen Cray Blitz, Deep Blue, Bebe, Belle and others that were a very important part of computer chess history.
This comes down to whether you are trying to turn this into a programming contest or a classic style computer chess style competition, where it's all about the best computing system, not just the software. In my opinion, this is how it should be because you cannot make this contest "fair" unless you do the following: 1. Forbid programming teams - because having a team of authors is an "unfair" advantage if this is supposed to be a programming contest. 2. Require everyone to use the same exact computing system. 3. Forbid wealthier programmers from using clusters for testing because that is unfair too. I think this is pretty silly - it's not really in the spirit of what these have been about in past years. - Don On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 14:56 -0800, terry mcintyre wrote: > I notice that the 2008 icga chess tournament is limited to 8 cores. > > David Levy's justification seems curious to me. He mentions that an early > microcomputer held its own against a mighty mainframe, and that many top > chess programs run on PCs, but he wishes to discourage being able to "buy the > title" by using larger clusters of computers. > > The 8-core limit seems like the constraints on some car races, which limit > displacement, intake sizes, and a host of other variables in order to make > the race more exciting. If the cars are all the same, then driver skill is > what really matters. > > But computers have a lot more flexibility. Should these be eight AMD cores or > Intel cores? x86 or Itanium? or PowerPC? Should they be on a single 8-socket > motherboard, or four or eight motherboards tied together by ethernet or > infiniband? How about FPGAs with hundreds (or even thousands ) of tiny > special-purpose processors? What about overclocking? There are folks who > claim 6 or 8 GHz speeds with nitrogen cooling. > > There's a place for competitions with the same resources across the board, > but there's also a lot of excitement in the "run what you brung" competition, > of a different sort. This is all the more true when - unlike Formula 500 cars > - the average enthusiast can reasonably expect to drive something like the > current supercomputers in a few years. Something like the 80-core Larrabee > might be on our desktops in a decade. > > I think that lower-budget teams with "only" eight cores will be driven to > explore approaches which use the hardware more optimally. > > Terry McIntyre <terrymcint...@yahoo.com> > > > -- Libertarians Do It With Consent! > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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/
