guyhaw wrote:Ed: I think you are beginning to sound like an overclocking/fridge salesman rather than an endgame enthusiast - so maybe this is the wrong place for this duscussion.
I'll leave that remark alone in the interest of peace.
guyhaw wrote:I noticed that your checkers benchmarks are on 6-man checkers endgames - but 9-man EGTs have been generated and the frontier is now 10-man. So why not show benchmarks where the challenge is?
Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer solved checkers, so there is no frontier for that game, technically speaking. Ed Gilbert generated a 10-piece database for the game of checkers as well, but this was not Distance To Win, only win-loss-draw, or "Game Theoretical Value" as it is commonly called.
Only two people have generated Distance to Win databases for checkers: Gil Dodgen, the true pioneer for checkers "perfect play", and myself. We solved the 7-piece Distance to Win database together as a team in 2003. I've since done 8-, 9-, and parts of the 10-piece database. At 1.25 bytes per position, the 9- and 10-piece Distance To Win databases are a huge challenge. There would be no way to implement a benchmarking application for this, since very few people have access to the type of hardware I have to run the solver application.
The 6-piece checkers database benchmark is just that: a benchmark. It can be run in a few hours, and the longevity of the test eliminates people with "rigged" overclocks that are not stable or can only execute for short periods of time.
It serves its purpose in that many people can run it, needing less than 1 GB of RAM, and they can send in the report.txt file to let me know about how fast their particular hardware setup is.
guyhaw wrote:I'm a sysems engineer, not someone needing the 'fix' of the nominally-fastest CPU. If I wanted more CPU power, I'd buy more cores - because the sort of computations I want to do have enough parallelism to exploit multi-core.
OK. To each his own. The computer industry can provide what you need. I like building faster versions of what the computer industry provides.
guyhaw wrote:The 'risk' I referred to is not in the overclocking but in the assembly of 'specialist components' necessary to achieve the cooling. These assemblies are produced by relatively small-scale companies and they are less tested than mainline I.T.
These days, a computer company that generates about $100 million in annual revenue is considered "small", but they still need to manufacture reliable components. Now, if you are talking about some of the -200 Fahrenheit rigs out there, such as this one (from England)
http://www.xtremesystems.org/FORUMS/sho ... p?t=223974
...then yes, I would agree, this "one off" is fairly untested and a home built design is just that. But there are companies that produce various overclocking components in high volume. For instance:
CoolIt Systems of Canada, about $10,000,000 per year in sales
http://www.coolitsystems.com/
Frozen CPU, who has emerged as the "New Egg" of overclocking and cooling
http://www.frozencpu.com/
Koolance is another reliable supplier with a fairly large market
http://www.koolance.com/default.php
I think you were just unaware of companies like these, which is fine, a year ago, so was I.
guyhaw wrote:Some, or maybe all, of your physics may be correct - but that does not mean you have a good argument for fridge-freezing and overclocking.
Well, I can modify existing hardware that exists today, and deliver performance that is about 8 years ahead of schedule if you apply linear regression analysis with the most contemporary models of processing gains. If you want to label this as a "bad argument", you are welcome to do so.
guyhaw wrote:I look forward to your contribution on chess EGT discussions but your argument, which sounds suspiciously like sales hype,...
Hype?
Yankees baseball player Yogi Berra had a great saying: "It ain't braggin, if you can do it."
And I don't wish to brag, but sales of this 5.0 GHz Gulftown are doing fabulous. If you type
5.0 ghz gulftown into google, even without the quotes, not only is this system on page 1 of Google, every link on page 1 except for 2 or 3 are talking about this exact computer that I build.
I was talking about making a massively parallel version of it (something you should like) but there does not appear to be an endgame tablebase generator that could keep 24 cores busy. Is there a way right now?
If you go through some of my posts, I think the discussions were reaching the point of my involvement of writing such software, when my 10-piece checkers project winds down, and after I publish those results and release that source code.