Deep Blue vs Rybka
Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2010 3:06 am
I think one of the most powerful evidences of Software progress if is you take the case of Deep Blue in 1997, doing 200 MILLION nodes per second and compare it to the OLD Rybka 3, even ignoring the cutting edge i7.
We don't have a precise estimate of the strength of Deep Blue, but we know that in 1997 it beat Gary Kasparov in a close match scoring 3.5 - 2.5.
I don't believe any reasonable person thinks Deep Blue is stronger than Rybka and about 2 or 3 years ago people were saying that any of the top programs would beat Deep Blue in a match pretty easily.
Joel Benjamin, a grandmaster, estimated Deep Blue to be about 2750 ELO in strength at the time of the 1997 match and that Rybka 3 (this was 3 years ago) over 3000 ELO on state of the art hardware of even 3 years ago.
These are both very "fuzzy" numbers (according to George Bush) but to put things into perspective 3 years ago Rybka 3 was giving strong Grandmasters pawn odds in matches and winning those matches. It was already a foregone conclusion that computers now have to be handicapped. This is very strong indication that Deep Blue is a few hundred ELO weaker than Rybka even with far superior hardware.
From comments Bob Hyatt has made over the years Deep Blue represented the state of the art not just in hardware, but also in software. I remember very clearly an assertion he made that no PC program compares to Deep Blue even at the same nodes per second. He gave anecdotal evidence that Deep Blue couldn't be tested against the best programs even when the top programs were turned way up to (or Deep Blue reduced like crazy) to match the NPS and also talked about how Deep Blue had an evaluation function far more sophisticated than any of the best programs made possible by hardware.
So we can take it that Deep Blue represent the very best in state of the art software in 1997 and that Rybka represents the very best in 2007, which is a just a 10 year span.
A good round number is 100 to 1. Rybka on 1 cores i7 is about 2 million nodes per second and Deep Blue is 200 million. This is 100 to 1. I'm not sure Rybka is actually hitting 2 million nodes per second so this is just an estimate.
So Rybka with 100 to 1 time odds handicap is surpassing 1997 state of the art software by something like 200-300 ELO.
We don't have a precise estimate of the strength of Deep Blue, but we know that in 1997 it beat Gary Kasparov in a close match scoring 3.5 - 2.5.
I don't believe any reasonable person thinks Deep Blue is stronger than Rybka and about 2 or 3 years ago people were saying that any of the top programs would beat Deep Blue in a match pretty easily.
Joel Benjamin, a grandmaster, estimated Deep Blue to be about 2750 ELO in strength at the time of the 1997 match and that Rybka 3 (this was 3 years ago) over 3000 ELO on state of the art hardware of even 3 years ago.
These are both very "fuzzy" numbers (according to George Bush) but to put things into perspective 3 years ago Rybka 3 was giving strong Grandmasters pawn odds in matches and winning those matches. It was already a foregone conclusion that computers now have to be handicapped. This is very strong indication that Deep Blue is a few hundred ELO weaker than Rybka even with far superior hardware.
From comments Bob Hyatt has made over the years Deep Blue represented the state of the art not just in hardware, but also in software. I remember very clearly an assertion he made that no PC program compares to Deep Blue even at the same nodes per second. He gave anecdotal evidence that Deep Blue couldn't be tested against the best programs even when the top programs were turned way up to (or Deep Blue reduced like crazy) to match the NPS and also talked about how Deep Blue had an evaluation function far more sophisticated than any of the best programs made possible by hardware.
So we can take it that Deep Blue represent the very best in state of the art software in 1997 and that Rybka represents the very best in 2007, which is a just a 10 year span.
A good round number is 100 to 1. Rybka on 1 cores i7 is about 2 million nodes per second and Deep Blue is 200 million. This is 100 to 1. I'm not sure Rybka is actually hitting 2 million nodes per second so this is just an estimate.
So Rybka with 100 to 1 time odds handicap is surpassing 1997 state of the art software by something like 200-300 ELO.