Terry,
I don't think the part of the argument looking at hardware is sound. You
are assuming that computing power is going to continue to provide a
linear strength increase with every doubling. I think the argument being
made by a few of the previous posters is that the strength curve is
showing asymptotic behaviour, and it is very possible that it will tail
off somewhere soon with the current generation of algorithms.
The 19x19 board, lest anybody forgets, is huge:
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/go/legal.html. A few gazillion percent of
added speed is not enough. Faster hardware *will* however help us
execute algorithms that are infeasible now, and I think that is part of
the argument Don is making.
I have a lot of respect for Olivier and people like Magnus who put all
this effort into experimenting with heavy playout patterns.
Unfortunately, it's a bad sign that there is so much work now going into
pattern tuning for MCTS on 19x19.. when we reach a tuning stage like
that, I get a feeling of deja vu. That's what all the traditional
programs started spending time on.
Christian
On 11/06/2009 07:04, terry mcintyre wrote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Don Dailey <dailey....@gmail.com>
**
> My basic observation is that over the several year period I have
been in this forum, I have detected a huge amount of resistance to
the idea that hardware could have anything to do with computer go
strength, despite the fact that it keeps proving to be so. The
resistance is strong enough that we have to explain it way when it
happens, by saying things like we have hit a wall and it won't happen
any more thank goodness.
You overrstate the "resistance" - it's not that anybody is saying
hardware is irrelevant. In fact, did we not have a recent discussion
over the merits of two different CPU variations? We've seen a fair
number of multi-processor entrants at competitions, besides.
The questions is"how much does hardware matter?" So far, we have one
data point to work with: David Fotland's excellent Many Faces of Go is
"about one stone stronger" when it uses 32 cores instead of 2. That's
nice to have, but if we extrapolate, a factor of 16 is 3 doublings or
about 4.5 years, in terms of Moore's Law. It will only take 9*4.5,
roughly 40 years, to reach pro-level play.
We don't have data from Mogo yet, but I wonder if they are seeing 2-3
stones improvement for their 3200-node version?
The less patient among us may wish to seek algorithmic improvements to
bridge the gap a bit sooner.
Got to be some reason for bright programmers and mathematicians to
work on the problen, after all; otherwise we could just wait 40 years
for Intel and AMD to deliver 32,768 cores on a single chip - or will
it be a silicon wafer?
In other fields, algorithmic improvements have led multiple orders of
magnitude improvement in running time. Humans manage to complete
30-minute games on a 19x19 board, so we do have evidence that the game
can be played well at such a speedy pace.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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