Posted by markusw 11 hours ago
Of course, “human vs supercomputer” is more exciting to the public than “human vs toaster controller”, especially when the latter in small quantities costs less than a cup of coffee.
On a kinda similar note i always wander that about indie video games. We have this massive hits like balatro, vampire survivors, that easily could be made in the era of SNES or N64. But somehow we have to wait 30 years to get them.
It clearly wasn't technical side of things that prevented that, but also I don't believe it was lack of creativity.
Some could argue that it is just what art is, we will get every year some new thing, creating all "possible and meaningful" art right now isn't even valid thing to consider, because art isn't about exhausting a finite set of possibilities.
But at the other hand some mechanics, design solutions in the hindsight seem kinda obvious and make me wonder, what things we do not see now, but will look obvious to people 30 years from now.
> It clearly wasn't technical side of things that prevented that, but also I don't believe it was lack of creativity.
I don't know those specific games, but I think this often happens because, although the thing has been technically possible for decades, it used to be relatively difficult/expensive/obscure, and now it's far more accessible.
In those days, writing and publishing a SNES game was something that relatively very few people would have even thought to attempt, let alone had the knowledge and skills and capital to pull off successfully. Nowadays, creating and publishing a SNES-level game is comparatively very easy (at the technical level, that is; making a good original game is of course still hard), and so a large portion of the people with an idea and some motivation can actually go ahead and do it. And now that games are fully mainstream, there will be more of those people in the first place. Many of the resulting games won't be very interesting, but collectively we're exploring the design space much more quickly.
edit: I was probably silly to focus on literal SNES games instead of 'SNES era' games, but the point still stands: creating games for any platform back then was harder and more obscure than it is now (especially given that we're talking about a technical level that required quite efficient use of the hardware back then, but can be done with extremely inefficient use of the hardware now).
I don't know I fully agree with this. Consoles always had the "walled garden" thing going for them, but on the other side of things, developing games became so cheap and easy during the personal computer revolution that whole industry collapsed in '83 under a massive flood of shovelware...
Game design (like other creative expressions) is the same. Each new game doesn't come from a vacuum, it's a progression from everything that has come before.
Also, don't underestimate the "juice" that these days is relatively easy to do but would be expenseive back then. Balatro has dozens of very small things going on graphically that make it feel real nice to play that most certainly not be free on SNES hardware.
And like vampire survivors is just Robotron/Smash TV with infinity number of sprites on screen. The limitation is very much hardware in that case.
Every board game could have been built thousands of years ago, at least after the dawn of some reasonable writing/drawing media. But technology in design hadn't accumulated enough. To go farther, every bit of math could have been done thousands of years ago, but new math had to draw on earlier math. New math didn't rely (much) on special paper.
Also, "hit" probably isn't a good metric. Those games might have showed up back then and just been moderately notable, like dozens or hundreds of other games were.
And, with more work, that's true of computers in general; they can all do the same computations once you somehow wire up enough memory: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004
For chess though, there are time constraints. The 386 is a lot slower. Is it fast enough?
An 80386 is about 10–13 Dhrystone MIPS, while a 200MHz Pentium Pro is about 90–450, according to https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html. So we're talking about a further slowdown on the order of 20×. I don't know how to estimate how much that would lower its Elo.
The article says:
> By making a number of adjustments to the algorithm and tuning it to the Pentium, we can increase its Elo to 2846 ± 35 at 1 second per move, 3109 ± 79 at 10 seconds per move, and 3180 ± 80 at 30 seconds per move.
So making it 30× faster would raise its 1-second Elo by about 334 points, and ln(30) is 3.4, so that's about 100 points per factor of e. ln(10) is 2.3, so we'd interpolate a prediction of 230 points gained at 10× faster, reasonably close to the 263 points reported.
If we extrapolate that in the other direction, ln(20) is 3.0, so on the 80386 we'd expect a loss of about 300 Elo points, down from 2846 to 2550 or so. Still enough to wipe the floor with Crafty, but low enough that Kasparov would usually beat it.
But we don't really know if that extrapolation is valid.
Throw a 3dfx Voodoo in there and do some real-time 3D Gaussian Splatting!
A lot of support for old CPUs & platforms they're on goes through emulators like QEMU. Or plain old 'go with specs, disturb code as little as possible, and assume (hope) it still works'. But nothing beats running on actual hardware. Uncommon configurations, specific drivers that may have been broken (sometimes for a looong time before someone notices), spec says A but hardware does B, etc.