----- Original Message ----
> From: David Doshay <ddos...@mac.com>
> Programmers work on all kinds of hardware. Making them port their
> code to some arbitrary "standard" platform is not a great idea. Just
> as one voice, I will not bother to port my code to a different box. So,
> if the competitions are all on the same hardware you are running a
> *Go -playing-programs-developed-on-that-platform* competition.
> And that sounds silly to me.
>
> I have been working on Go on moderate sized clusters (25 - 75 CPUs)
> for about 5 years. Most of my work has shown that it is not trivial to
> write a program that scales reasonably over those processors. It is far
> from trivial to develop and debug programs that run on clusters. More
> hardware is no guarantee of a stronger program and is not a simple
> way to get one.
Amen! Furthermore, I'd strongly encourage developers using clusters, even
supercompter-sized clusters -- these are the forerunners of computers which you
and I will use next year, or ten years from now. The existence of strong
competitors will spur candidates with more ordinary quad and octo-core
computers to work harder to optimize their codes. As David Levy admitted,
microprocessors have done quite creditably in competion with mainframes in the
Chess world.
I was delighted to see Mogo on a supercomputer pitted against a professional Go
player. That experiment surely raised many interesting questions. How big would
a supercomputer need to be, to beat a pro on an even game? What other
refinements to the program would be needed? Could the program be optimized to
use the hardware even more effectively? Would an FPGA be able to deliver the
processing power needed in a smaller hardware package?
I would not want the design space for computer Go to be restricted to
"currently available desktop computers," especially when that target advances
so rapidly.
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