Re: Houdini 3
Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2012 5:32 am
Start-up times may be a factor for Rybka at super-fast speeds, but for Komodo and all of the other top programs these are not a significant factor unless you are talking about something like game in one second. They do not play a role in explaining why Komodo and Stockfish are weaker than say Ivanhoe at bullet (1 min) chess but stronger at blitz (5 min) and much stronger at longer time limits. We will have our MP soon, but because so many people insist on judging engines by very fast games, we really need to figure out precisely why we cannot compete at these bullet speeds, in order to fix the problem if possible. It is almost surely some detail about the search that Ippo uses and that SF and Komodo do not use, but which detail is responsible I cannot guess, as we have tried almost every Ippo idea, mostly without success.M ANSARI wrote:I this entire debate about scaling of Komodo vs. Houdini is pointless, rather than handicap all engines to play on one core so that they can compete with Komodo, it makes a lot of sense to make Komodo MP to compete with other engines. Time is a constant in computers, and this constant gets exponentially improved with each new generation of hardware. But I will be first to admit that some engines perform dramatically better at very short time controls than others, and yes the Ippolit derivatives are extremely strong at very fast blitz times. I don't know why that is so, but I always had the belief that in the case of Rybka, it has a lot of overhead in initializing start of processes (as it is a process based engine). These overheads are in mili seconds, but they can quickly become prominent when time runs down and games are very fast 1 0 or 2 0.