bob wrote: I recall them losing one game due to a power outage, and one game due to comm problems (Fritz in Hong Kong) which is an incredible streak over 11 years.
And IIRC it was Deep Thought II that lost to Fritz and not Deep Blue as always advertised by Chessbase. Deep Blue was not yet ready.
Confusion caused by IBM. That was "deep blue prototype" which Hsu/Campbell had said was "deep blue software running on deep thought hardware". So you are correct. I was lumping them all together. Chiptest first played in 1986 with serious bugs. It won the ACM event in 1987 and every year after that, only losing the two games I mentioned to the best of my recollection, one on time due to a power failure at the Watson center, one in Hong Kong primarily caused by a comm failure...
Was the game against Mephisto from ACM 1989 that with the power failure?
Deep Blue was remarkably strong for 1997 but it was far from being unbeatable. It was rare but it suffered draws and losses. I think we can estimate that it was about 4-5 years ahead of the PC programs. By 2002 a lot of very smart people believed that Junior or Fritz would beat it in a match. No point arguing about it because we can never know for sure.
I read somewhere (and I'll try to find it) that if you consider various incarnations of Deep Blue that actually played in tournaments, and performance rate it's total results, it is not particularly impressive because it only indicates something like a 200 ELO superiority over the best - but I think of all the games it lost a lot of them were due to unfortunate issues, so this is probably far from a fair metric (also considering that so few games were played.) I think in reality is was stronger than this. A crude calculation is that if it took programs 5 years to catch it, you can guesstimate it's superiority and I think that puts it as more like 400 ELO better than anyone else.
The Deep Blue team was very humble and were a joy to talk with. At the Hong Kong tournament Murray told me that they estimated their winning chances to be right around 50%. That sounds incredible at first unless you do the math. To survive a 5 round tournament with 24 players and have a 50% chance to be the winner you must not only be the best player, but best by a good margin. If their chances were 50%, the chances of the 23 other contestants were divided up among the remaining 50% so that is pretty impressive.
But this tells you that even the Deep Blue team expected to lose games relatively frequently, just much less frequently than anyone else! When it's all soberly analyzed and all the hype removed, Deep Blue stands out as the most outstanding program of it's day, but no more. (I am not sure if some early programs stand out even more, such as Belle or even before than the Chess 4.7 program, they were also seemingly unbeatable so this deserves a fact check.)
If you go back to 1997 when they won the Fredkin prize, they had a FIDE equivalent rating of 2650+. I don't remember the exact number but it was _well_ beyond the Fredkin prize requirement... What micro was close to that in long games. A couple of micros had beaten GM players in blitz (Cray Blitz defeated GM players all over the place in the 90's, as a reference). So they were very strong, and based on deep though vs everyone else thru 1994 ACM-sponsored events, they were clearly well "above and beyond."
How far is debatable. But I would not use that 200 number myself since we have no data for Micros playing super-GM players at 40 moves in 2 hours.
We clearly have data about computers who played humans in 120/40 time control
I remember reading that Fritz3 on P90 could get the IM norm in tournament time control games so it is not correct to say that programs did not play long time games.
No micro was close to 2650 but I am sure that
micro's were at least at 2400 level at that time so 200 elo difference between Deep thought or Deep blue prototype and the best micro's of the same time is not illogical.
Uri
When did Fritz play in such tournaments in the 1987-1988 time frame? The DB project had a pretty daunting task to win the Fredkin stage 3 prize. And my dates were wrong.
DB produced that 2650+ rating in 1988. Not 1997. 1997 was for the final stage of the Fredkin prize, beating the world champion in a match.
So, more correctly, do you believe Fritz in 1988 was within 200 points of a program that had just earned a rating of 2600+ playing 24 games against only GM-level competition? IMHO, not a chance in hades.... Most micros were jokes in 1988...
bob wrote:If you go back to 1997 when they won the Fredkin prize, they had a FIDE equivalent rating of 2650+. I don't remember the exact number but it was _well_ beyond the Fredkin prize requirement... What micro was close to that in long games. A couple of micros had beaten GM players in blitz (Cray Blitz defeated GM players all over the place in the 90's, as a reference). So they were very strong, and based on deep though vs everyone else thru 1994 ACM-sponsored events, they were clearly well "above and beyond."
How far is debatable. But I would not use that 200 number myself since we have no data for Micros playing super-GM players at 40 moves in 2 hours.
The 89 and 90 ACM performance of Lang's Mephisto was astonishing as well. Hard fights with Berliner's HiTech from Carnegie Mellon as well at that time, with a lot emotions, I guess. In 1990 the same three 89 programs finished top three (in different order). DT lost from HiTech, but won the tournament as HiTech lost from Mephisto which on the other hand lost from DT.
DT lost from Mephisto (89), HiTech (90) and Mchess Pro (94) round 2, which looks like win by default according to Hsu's post in rgc.
That was the game. Mchess Pro. Last ACM event. And they still won the tournament. And they had earned the Fredkin stage 2 prize 6 years earlier in 1988, when we had no microcomputers even thinking about GM level chess, much less 2600+
bob wrote:But it would be nice to see that hardware doing 30-35+ ply searches using todays approaches. Would bring back the dominance they had in the late 80's and early 90's all over again.
Will a "cluster crafty" be able to reach those depths any time soon?
Good question. On a cluster, you are probably going to be looking at high overhead due to message-passing, no shared hash, etc. So to reach those depths, we are going to need some serious speed, as in maybe 10B nodes per second, which would need something on the order of 500 nodes at least.
But it is probably doable, although it could certainly take more nodes. Perhaps a factor of 10x more even...
mhull wrote:Will a "cluster crafty" be able to reach those depths any time soon?
What's the point when "cluster crafty" at today's Bob's Uni cluster would fell short of even SF1.7 on i7, not to mention Rybka 4 or Ivanhoe.
Maybe if you increased current cluster node count tenfold you would get a competitive match.
Dann Corbit wrote:Today, we could build the very same FPGAs and get a much higher clock rate. In addition, we could do a recompile of Ivanhoe or some such source code and get a branching factor of 2.
So without much effort, I guess that the Deep Blue team today could get +1000 Elo or so.
That an incredible BS.
FPGAs are slooow. Implementing branching in them is even slower. This is a same kind of statement as saying we could in today's (general purpose) FPGA build a DSP faster than state-of-the-art DSPs from 1997.
But ok, not knowing much about hardware can be an excuse but saying that with today's technology you could build a machine with 3800 elo is just ridiculous (I assume you meant 1000+ elo from original DB, since 1000+ elo from today's state-of-the-art would mean 4300 which we will not see in our lives).
For 500 elo stronger from current best existing software on i7 you would need at least 5000 times more nodes than i7, meaning 40000 nodes hardware with the same software efficiency as software on i7.
And that's nothing but pure SF.
mhull wrote:Will a "cluster crafty" be able to reach those depths any time soon?
What's the point when "cluster crafty" at today's Bob's Uni cluster would fell short of even SF1.7 on i7, not to mention Rybka 4 or Ivanhoe.
Maybe if you increased current cluster node count tenfold you would get a competitive match.
The point is that Bob knows how to do it and has the resources to test and perfect the technique.
mhull wrote:The point is that Bob knows how to do it and has the resources to test and perfect the technique.
The only thing I find interesting is whether or not he'd be able to achieve at least 20elo per node doubling starting from 32 nodes cluster. So that, for example, with 1000 nodes he could get 100elo more compared to 32 nodes cluster.
It would really surprised me if he could.
Dann Corbit wrote:Today, we could build the very same FPGAs and get a much higher clock rate. In addition, we could do a recompile of Ivanhoe or some such source code and get a branching factor of 2.
So without much effort, I guess that the Deep Blue team today could get +1000 Elo or so.
That an incredible BS.
FPGAs are slooow. Implementing branching in them is even slower. This is a same kind of statement as saying we could in today's (general purpose) FPGA build a DSP faster than state-of-the-art DSPs from 1997.
But ok, not knowing much about hardware can be an excuse but saying that with today's technology you could build a machine with 3800 elo is just ridiculous (I assume you meant 1000+ elo from original DB, since 1000+ elo from today's state-of-the-art would mean 4300 which we will not see in our lives).
For 500 elo stronger from current best existing software on i7 you would need at least 5000 times more nodes than i7, meaning 40000 nodes hardware with the same software efficiency as software on i7.
And that's nothing but pure SF.
+ 1000 Elo needs 20 doublings. I guess ten from hardware and ten from software.
Since they did not even use null move, the branching factor was probably huge.
If the estimate is off, it's not off by enough to be important.
Dann Corbit wrote:Today, we could build the very same FPGAs and get a much higher clock rate. In addition, we could do a recompile of Ivanhoe or some such source code and get a branching factor of 2.
So without much effort, I guess that the Deep Blue team today could get +1000 Elo or so.
That an incredible BS.
FPGAs are slooow. Implementing branching in them is even slower. This is a same kind of statement as saying we could in today's (general purpose) FPGA build a DSP faster than state-of-the-art DSPs from 1997.
But ok, not knowing much about hardware can be an excuse but saying that with today's technology you could build a machine with 3800 elo is just ridiculous (I assume you meant 1000+ elo from original DB, since 1000+ elo from today's state-of-the-art would mean 4300 which we will not see in our lives).
For 500 elo stronger from current best existing software on i7 you would need at least 5000 times more nodes than i7, meaning 40000 nodes hardware with the same software efficiency as software on i7.
And that's nothing but pure SF.
+ 1000 Elo needs 20 doublings. I guess ten from hardware and ten from software.
Since they did not even use null move, the branching factor was probably huge.
If the estimate is off, it's not off by enough to be important.
This is not general purpose FPGA, it's communication FPGA which is a completely different thing.
Today's fastest general purpose FPGAs (built in 65nm) run at around 600MHz and they have huuuge overhead.
Take for example AES (advanced encryption standard) core built in today's high performance FPGA (Virtex 6). The maximum frequency you could run it would be something like half of the maximum Virtex 6 frequency which would be 300MHz (since the critical path length for fast AES implementation is around 15).
In 1997 state-of-the-art technology was 0.35um process.
In for example 0.35um AMS process (which is not something very fancy like IBM or INTEL processes at that time) you could easily achieve 300MHz AES core in ASIC (15x2ns-very large gate delay for the given technology would give 300MHz).
