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Posted by markusw 11 hours ago

Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?(nicholas.carlini.com)
337 points | 150 commentspage 4
learntoplaypitc 4 hours ago|
[flagged]
HardHardman2033 6 hours ago||
[flagged]
bell-cot 7 hours ago||
In one sense, Knuth fans and really good engineers are correct to prioritize algorithms.

Unfortunately, most humans see big|new|expensive hardware as great status signifiers, barriers to lesser folks joining the Cool Club, and optimal sources of sales commissions.

squidbeak 5 hours ago|
Technically interesting but also fanciful bollocks - because there was no Stockfish in 1996, and developing a sufficiently strong equivalent in time for the Deep Blue match would have taken substantially longer that the 18 years the current Stockfish has needed, thanks to the drastically weaker processor capabilities back then.
05hundred 5 hours ago|
"Bollocks" feels like a very uncharitable read. Sure, investing time/money into creating a better chess engine instead of building a faster computer would not have worked out for IBM, but the post never argues that they should have done that. It makes the point that the majority of improvements of chess engines since have been algorithmic and not "free" gains from faster CPUs.

Deep Blue is just used as a point of reference to illustrate that fact.

squidbeak 5 hours ago||
You can't disentangle the compute from those algorithmic gains, though. Every small adjustment to its algorithms is made on the back of tests relying on compute.