RWilson@acorn.co.uk (07/11/90)
In recent article cdshaw@cs.UAlberta.CA (Chris Shaw) writes: >You brought up the example of computer chess recently. The fact of the matter >is that unless you are an international chess master, the program Deep Thought >will beat you. Why did I mention this? Well, the major reason Deep Thought >beats excellent chess people is because of its specialized hardware. The >program operates by a well-known brute force algorithm. My main point is that >Deep Thought would be useless if the program relied on some set of greasy >assembler tweaks on some two-bit general purpose CPU. And if you refer to 20th North American Computer Chess Championship (an article is in volume 33 number 7 of Communications of the ACM), you can see the reports of top Chess machines, including the machine which has beaten Deep Thought. Of the 10 machines, only two were entered using C, 7 use native assembler and one (Deep Thought) uses special microcode. All machines are rated 2160 or higher (i.e. beat most humans). Which machine beat Deep Thought? I'm glad you asked... a 68030 coded in assembler. General purpose computing is improving more rapidly than special purpose hardware, even of the wackier types. --Roger Wilson (gosh, I didn't push ARM once, what's going on?)