Re: parallel alpha-beta pruning possible?

2012-10-16 Thread Michael Fogus
I would probably look at the work that Robert Hyatt has done around
parallel search in Crafty. He's published his findings far and wide and may
still be active online. He's a wealth of information and fairly nice guy.

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Re: parallel alpha-beta pruning possible?

2012-10-16 Thread Jack Moffitt
> scenario. The minute forking occurs however you lose coordination
> capabilities (at least this is my understanding). He said it very casually
> in the video that is why this has been bugging me  so much...

Fork/Join is just threads, so I'm not sure why you'd lose coordination
capabilities. You can use all the normal coordination stuff like locks
and mutexes, etc.  Granted, it won't be pretty :)

jack.

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Re: parallel alpha-beta pruning possible?

2012-10-16 Thread Jim - FooBar();

On 16/10/12 21:48, Alan Malloy wrote:

You will get better results from a game-programming forum, or indeed
from a google search for "parallel alpha beta" than from a bunch of
clojure guys with no particular experience in your problem domain.


The question is more around JDK7 and reducers. Google gives me loads of 
results but it's all the traditional 'lock and suffer' approach. What I 
meant is basically this:


let's forget about parallelism for a second...once someone has minimax 
ready it is a matter of minutes to turn it into an alpha-beta but in 
doing so you introduce dependencies between the branches and this is 
fine in a serial scenario. The minute forking occurs however you lose 
coordination capabilities (at least this is my understanding). He said 
it very casually in the video that is why this has been bugging me  so 
much...


obviously I'm wrong I'm just trying to find someone that knows a lot 
around reducers/fork-join t give me clues...thanks for your time anyway :-)


Jim

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Re: parallel alpha-beta pruning possible?

2012-10-16 Thread Alan Malloy
You will get better results from a game-programming forum, or indeed
from a google search for "parallel alpha beta" than from a bunch of
clojure guys with no particular experience in your problem domain.

On Oct 16, 1:27 pm, "Jim - FooBar();"  wrote:
> After watching this presentation[1] by Brian Goetz, in which he
> discusses the fork-join framework and how it is intended to be used I
> was left with a major question. Around the end of the talk he said and I
> quote
>
> "...fork-join can be used for game-tree exploration..."
>
> while the slides actually had
> -Move generation
> -Alpha-beta
> ...
> 
>
> As soon as I saw/heard that I almost fell of my chair!!! He caught me
> completely by surprise simply because I've given this quite a bit of
> though myself... NOw, I'm not implying that I am nowhere near as smart
> or informed as he is but the 'objection' I have is pretty simple. I
> already have a parallel minimax (some of you have actually helped) so I
> know how that's done and it wasn't too hard because minimax is
> exhaustive search. No heuristics whatsoever...as long as you work with
> immutable data-structures God is on your side and all is well!
>
> HOWEVER, as soon as you introduce heuristics (even simplistic like
> alpha-beta pruning) you 've lost the ability to split the work in
> pieces. You've suddenly introduced coordination which only makes sense
> in a serial fashion. Since pruning a particular branch of the game-tree
> requires knowing how the previous branch did  how can you ever fork?
> What if these 2 branches are on separate threads? How can you ever do
> that without locking?
>
> I am very excited that someone like Brian Goetz is claiming something
> like this even though I don't understand how such an inherently serial
> process could be efficiently forked.
>
> Can anyone help?
>
>   [1]http://www.infoq.com/presentations/brian-goetz-concurrent-parallel
>
> Jim

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parallel alpha-beta pruning possible?

2012-10-16 Thread Jim - FooBar();
After watching this presentation[1] by Brian Goetz, in which he 
discusses the fork-join framework and how it is intended to be used I 
was left with a major question. Around the end of the talk he said and I 
quote


"...fork-join can be used for game-tree exploration..."

while the slides actually had
-Move generation
-Alpha-beta
...


As soon as I saw/heard that I almost fell of my chair!!! He caught me 
completely by surprise simply because I've given this quite a bit of 
though myself... NOw, I'm not implying that I am nowhere near as smart 
or informed as he is but the 'objection' I have is pretty simple. I 
already have a parallel minimax (some of you have actually helped) so I 
know how that's done and it wasn't too hard because minimax is 
exhaustive search. No heuristics whatsoever...as long as you work with 
immutable data-structures God is on your side and all is well!


HOWEVER, as soon as you introduce heuristics (even simplistic like 
alpha-beta pruning) you 've lost the ability to split the work in 
pieces. You've suddenly introduced coordination which only makes sense 
in a serial fashion. Since pruning a particular branch of the game-tree 
requires knowing how the previous branch did  how can you ever fork? 
What if these 2 branches are on separate threads? How can you ever do 
that without locking?


I am very excited that someone like Brian Goetz is claiming something 
like this even though I don't understand how such an inherently serial 
process could be efficiently forked.


Can anyone help?


 [1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/brian-goetz-concurrent-parallel

Jim

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