Chess engine on ASIC bitcoin miner?

[henk2]

Is practical?
Is it even possible?
Surely a simple MTCS evaluation should be possible on it.

[smatovic]

...
Surely a simple MTCS evaluation should be possible on it.

What leads you to this conclusion?

Quote from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ASIC

"Note that Bitcoin ASIC chips generally can only be used for Bitcoin mining."

--
Srdja

[odomobo]

The entire point of ASICs is that they are designed to do exactly 1 thing very well, unlike CPUs and GPUs which are very general-purpose.

[henk2]

...
Surely a simple MTCS evaluation should be possible on it.

What leads you to this conclusion?

Quote from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ASIC

"Note that Bitcoin ASIC chips generally can only be used for Bitcoin mining."

--
Srdja

But how efficient would trying to emulate code on it?
It can run calculations, you can do a lot with translation and emulation.

You can emulate x86 on ARM despite the architectures being completely different.
You can also emulate old game consoles on your PC or android, despite different architextures.

[Dann Corbit]

...
Surely a simple MTCS evaluation should be possible on it.

What leads you to this conclusion?

Quote from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ASIC

"Note that Bitcoin ASIC chips generally can only be used for Bitcoin mining."

--
Srdja

But how efficient would trying to emulate code on it?
It can run calculations, you can do a lot with translation and emulation.

You can emulate x86 on ARM despite the architectures being completely different.
You can also emulate old game consoles on your PC or android, despite different architextures.

The concept is similar to the original use of graphic cards for math. We lied to them and told them they were just drawing triangles. But we tricked them into doing math for us. You might be able to extract some chess from an ASIC designed to calculate bitcoins, but it would make more sense to create custom ASICS for chess. The ASIC or FPGA approach works well short term, but fails miserably in the long run. After you burn the silicon, it begins to age. Chess software grows exponentially in strength as a function of time. So does commodity computer hardware. But the hard coded solution is cast in stone. Quite frankly, it does not make sense to do it that way.
Deep Blue and Hydra were successful and incredibly expensive custom hardware solutions. Today they would be thrashed by a software and hardware solution costing a laughably small fraction of their investment. On the other hand, if you are willing to pay a King's ransom, it would work today too. Personally, I would just wait.

[hgm]

We could build a neural-network emulator, though. This would be of general use. Clock speeds don't go up that fast anymore. Future technologies might allow you to build bigger nets on the same chip real estate, but perhaps you don't need more than what is already possible.

[smatovic]

...
Surely a simple MTCS evaluation should be possible on it.

What leads you to this conclusion?

Quote from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ASIC

"Note that Bitcoin ASIC chips generally can only be used for Bitcoin mining."

--
Srdja

But how efficient would trying to emulate code on it?
It can run calculations, you can do a lot with translation and emulation.

You can emulate x86 on ARM despite the architectures being completely different.
You can also emulate old game consoles on your PC or android, despite different architextures.

In general, you can emulate any turing machine on another turing machine,
despite the speed of emulation.

But I am not sure that you can run other code on these bitcoin ASICs than the
implemented hashing algortihm, so they may not be turing complete.

If they are programmable, someone could find a way to exploit this. If they are not
programmable, you will need to find a way to map chess computations to the
implemented hash algorithm.

Imagine ASICs as speed cars that are very fast, but can drive only straightforward.

--
Srdja

[Karlo Bala]

Is practical?
Is it even possible?
Surely a simple MTCS evaluation should be possible on it.

No & no.

ASIC - Application-Specific Integrated Circuit
Bitcoin miner just performs SHA2 hash calculation. Nothing more, nothing less. It is not an FPGA (at least new miners are not an FPGA), and cannot be programmed.