What is the purpose of chess engines?

[corres]

...
What are chess engines used for?
...

I have short but general answer:
Chess engines used for sparing chess players from thinking about heavy chess problems and for making even weak chess players believe in they understand the chess game.

[Dann Corbit]

This is all nice but reminds me on STAR trek 5: why does god need a space ship ?!

Why does chess need this enormous hardware?

Because it is an exponential game.

When I said programmers have no new ideas I did not thought about using more cores.

They have new ideas and new hardware. Both improve exponentially over time.

Moore's law for silicon is running out for improved shrink and GHz improvement. So the only way to go is sideways (more cores) for now, until a new technology besides silicon is realized.

I love the new hardware. Come January of this year, I will have cores coming out of my ears.
And I also plan to stuff the machine with 4 GPU cards. If you add up the threads from all the GPUs and CPUs, you can sew a tapestry from them.

[corres]

...
I love the new hardware. Come January of this year, I will have cores coming out of my ears.
And I also plan to stuff the machine with 4 GPU cards. If you add up the threads from all the GPUs and CPUs, you can sew a tapestry from them.

Excuse me, but i like to know for what you use this tremendous number of cores.

[Dann Corbit]

...
I love the new hardware. Come January of this year, I will have cores coming out of my ears.
And I also plan to stuff the machine with 4 GPU cards. If you add up the threads from all the GPUs and CPUs, you can sew a tapestry from them.

Excuse me, but i like to know for what you use this tremendous number of cores.

They keep my house toasty during the winter.

[Ovyron]

Dann and Zullil go to the same club

[corres]

...
I love the new hardware. Come January of this year, I will have cores coming out of my ears.
And I also plan to stuff the machine with 4 GPU cards. If you add up the threads from all the GPUs and CPUs, you can sew a tapestry from them.

Excuse me, but i like to know for what you use this tremendous number of cores.

They keep my house toasty during the winter.

If you would live in Alaska you could double the cores to toast.
What a perspective!

[Uri Blass]

...
What are chess engines used for?
...

I have short but general answer:
Chess engines used for sparing chess players from thinking about heavy chess problems and for making even weak chess players believe in they understand the chess game.

The opposite.
Chess engines make me believe that I do not understand the chess game because they do not help me to understand why a move that they suggest is best and I believe that they know better than me.

[Ozymandias]

They keep my house toasty during the winter.

When I tell people where the heating home comes from, they usually laugh, but I never knew what's laughable about killing two birds with one stone.

[dragontamer5788]

I love the new hardware. Come January of this year, I will have cores coming out of my ears.
And I also plan to stuff the machine with 4 GPU cards. If you add up the threads from all the GPUs and CPUs, you can sew a tapestry from them.

I like to daydream about the best hypothetical setup under some set dollar amount. For example, what is the best chess computer (or computer-cluster) to buy under $5000?

Bill of Materials:

* AMD RYZEN 5 3600 $200 6-core / 12-threads.
* 16GB Ram $80
* Motherboard $130
* $50 256GB SSD drive
* $100 Case, Power supply, Fans, etc. etc.
* $40 for used ConnectX3 10Gbps SFP+ Fiber networking card.
* 2x Vega56 per system4 at $300 each. (10.5-trillion operations/second, 410GB/s VRAM Bandwidth, 8GB HBM2 capacity)
* $1200 for the "base system". 3x of these systems for a cluster.

* CRS309-1G-8S+IN 8-port MikroTik 10Gbps SFP+ switch: $230
* 4x 6TB Toshiba x300 drives for $640 -- This "Database" will be centralized into one system providing 24TBs. 18.7TBs will be for the Sygzy 7-man Tablebase shared throughout the network.
* Shelving, Misc costs, etc. etc -- Remainder of budget $230 or so??? Hmm, might be cutting it close, but I'm close to $5000. I also overestimated the cost of some components.

Pushing the budget slightly higher than $5000 would allow for 4x nodes to work as a team. My presumption is that a GPU-based system wouldn't benefit from CPU-power, so I'm cutting CPU and DDR4 costs to the bone.

Assuming 4x Nodes (estimated costs around $6000 total) would give 84-Trillion operations/second, on an aggregate 3280GBps VRAM bandwidth with 64GB HBM2 RAM Capacity. Loaded with the full 7-man Tablebase and plenty of additional room to explore openings. The question is, what can the chess programmer do with a machine like that?

For neural-net fans, AMD's GPU isn't really optimized for LeelaZero. My hypothesis is that a good GPU-algorithm will be invented by somebody (hopefully me ) within the next few years, which would make the above system feasible. But for now, its hypothetical, because no software exists that really can take advantage of these specs.

[Ovyron]

When I tell people where the heating home comes from, they usually laugh, but I never knew what's laughable about killing two birds with one stone.

Because it's like using your Rocket Launcher to kill a fly. Sure, you already have the rocket launcher, and you want to kill the fly, but who's going to buy the weapon for that?