SmarThink 1.10 Moscow

[Marek Soszynski]

SmarThink Moscow - "The release has been taken a bit longer than forseen. Expected release date it by end of may. [sic] More info here..."

http://www.lokasoft.com/smarthink_moscow/

[ArmoredGuns]

No SMP capability? Pffft.

[Kaj Soderberg]

No SMP for now it seems. OK, a bit of a shame. But ST 1.1 can run over several (single) processors and thus tournaments at a time, which is fun and not at all bad when improvements are close 100 Elo. ST has an intriguing playing style. Sergei Markoff is an intelligent guy, so of course there must be an SMP update/version on its way. We might be in for quite a surprise.

Patience and meanwhile enjoyment,

Kaj

[Tony Thomas]

I think its pointless to have an SMP version until the engine make it to the top ranks. Even a 100 point improvement isnt good enough to make it to the top 5 ranks on single CPU, so what really would be the point of implementing SMP before improving the engine? I should add that I am eagerly avaiting the release of this engine as I have some money in the bank.

[ArmoredGuns]

I think its pointless to have an SMP version until the engine make it to the top ranks. Even a 100 point improvement isnt good enough to make it to the top 5 ranks on single CPU, so what really would be the point of implementing SMP before improving the engine? I should add that I am eagerly avaiting the release of this engine as I have some money in the bank.

Look at SmarThink's current rating:
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/

With the supposed 70-100 elo increase, it wouldn't be so far away of the top SMP engines. Add SMP capability and Smarthink in a quad would be around Loop, Glaurung and Deep Fritz's level which is excellent, surspassing the already strong Deep Junior and Deep Sjeng.

Honestly, there is no excuse about not making a commercial SMP engine nowadays. Dual cores are the mainstream now, and it's getting difficult to get single core processors. Quad cores are getting extremely cheap, Intel keeps lowering the Q6600's price more and more with the release of new processors. It's around $200 USD now.

I know it's not easy to implement parallel search to chess engines, but when going commercial there's no excuse. I refuse to buy non SMP engines in 2008.

[Tony Thomas]

Look at the list below, Smarthink is ranked 17th, with the supposed upperbound increase of 100 points it would be rated 2901 points. Then it would become the new Rank 8..Every engine above that (with the exception of Fritz11) supports SMP, so it wouldnt make it past Rank 7 even on 4 CPU's unless he manages to scale as well as Zappa.

http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/40 ... ons_only=1