I'm a bit late reading this thread and the discussion seems to have veered from the original topic a bit.
As to the CPU vs. memory discussion, it's not so clear-cut to me that CPU speeds are improving faster than memory. Twenty years ago you had CPUs in the 4-8Mhz range and around 1Mb of memory. Today both are about 1000 times higher. CPU speeds are not necessarily only represented by hertz of course, but both CPU and memory seemed to have progressed with roughly the same speed. The thing is, they don't progress evenly. So maybe at the moment CPUs are going a bit faster than memory. But this could be temporary, not necessarily a sustainable trend. Also, CPU speeds of a single processor has stalled for a few years now. Using multiple CPUs or cores you get easy doubles by going to two and four. But it also gets more and more expensive. And doubling the CPUs doesn't double the power really. A bit over ten years ago we made a tsume-go program using PN search. There we also had problems keeping the tree in memory, so we designed a tree-structure that would automatically swap part of the tree out to disk. But after that there was a period that this code seemed to have become superfluous, as memory suddenly became abundant. If we now have a memory shortage with respect to CPU power it's quite possible this is something cyclical. Mark _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
