mclane wrote: ↑Fri Apr 26, 2024 3:51 pm The point was: is the huge progress in computerchess part of hardware or software development.
With the 16 bit cpus the adress range was much bigger.
Suddenly not only 32 or with bank switching 96 kb was usable. But lot of memory more.
Suddenly we were in megabyte range.
That made hash tables possibe.
The engine could grow and use heavier evaluations and lot of new stuff.
So was this a feature of software or more a feature of hardware change from 8 bit adress room to 16 bit addresses ?
With the new 68000 cpu richard lang was capable to program a very strong engine in assembler.
And with the use of 68020 or 68030 and the increase of the mhz from 12 to 33 or 66 or even 133 mhz
the software was made faster.
The next big step was that the pcs made progress from a few mhz into much more mhz.
We remember 8086, 286, 386, 486-33, 486-66 and more. Then came pentiums much more speed.
And one day we had cpus with 2 cores, then with 4 cores and the race continues,
Today we have very fast cpus with lot memory, high speed and several cores,
So how big was the software progress that was not due to big hardware progress ?
Can somebody create a 6502 engine that beats ed schroeder , dave kittinger ?
People have no motivation to do something that nobody or almost nobody is going to use.
If there is a big prize money for the best 6502 engine in one year from the announcement (let say some rich person donate a prize of a million dollar for it) and nobody get something that is significantly stronger than what we have now then you have some evidence that it is really hard to get a significant improvement with the knowledge of today but today we have no evidence for this claim.
It is possible that only changing weights in the evaluation of what Ed did at that time may give 100 elo improvement and at that time it was hard to test but today I guess that with some work we can emulate Ed's engine in new hardware except being something like 1000 times faster that mean that with new hardware we can test changing weights 1000 times faster relative to what Ed could.