How fast was the Cray?

[D Sceviour]

Before Cray Blitz won over Belle, Bob Hyatt claimed something like the new Cray computer expected to achieve 12 ply of depth in a full width search every three minutes, probably from the root position. The original quotation is lost but one can wonder if the Cray ever achieved this. Could Deep Blue even do that?

[bob]

Before Cray Blitz won over Belle, Bob Hyatt claimed something like the new Cray computer expected to achieve 12 ply of depth in a full width search every three minutes, probably from the root position. The original quotation is lost but one can wonder if the Cray ever achieved this. Could Deep Blue even do that?

Sure. We were doing 10 ply back then, but we did start to see 11-12 on the T90.

I don't recall any such statement, so I don't remember the context at all. In 1983 we were doing 8 plies, about the same as Belle that year. We were searching 20K nodes per second, to Belle's 160K. But belle had some hardware obstacles that made the search less efficient (no searching hash move first to name just one).

Deep Blue was a horse of a different color. It was not using any selective search tricks at all, no null-move, etc. So comparing depths doesn't mean much.