Proposal - TLDRL - The Lower Deck Rating List, a Raspberry Pi RL

[smatovic]

Heyho,

I stumbled across TCEC with its 4k engine competition and had recently the idea for The Lower Deck Rating List, running a rating list/tournament 24/7 on a single Raspberry Pi 4 for 50 to 200 bucks @max 15W. I think it would be really nice to have such a thing for the average (and also pro) chess programmer, who is not willing to invests thousands of dollars into a hardware-rig for engine development, or was invited as a pro to OpenBench etc. The rating list could update with the recent Raspberry series over time, and for the programmer the task would then be like in the good old days, to squeze the most out of the given hardware. The Pi 4 has 4 ARM cores @1.8GHz, 1/2/4/8GB RAM, NEON SIMD units for NNUE stuff, and, as far as I got it, the current GPU speaks Vulkan, what, with some hacks, should be able to run a Lc0 like backend.

I pondered about setting this up by myself, the tech is not the issue, but I lack the time to engage in such a community endeavour, hence I post this as open proposal.

My initial thoughts:

- ponder off
- own book off
- all cores on
- CPU or GPU engine
- 1GB of RAM per engine, including hash table, neural network etc.
- 1GB of disk per engine, including binary, neural network file, etc.
- one engine type per author, AB, MCTS, CPU, GPU, etc.
- TC, Blitz, 4 minutes for 40 moves repeating
- EGTB (3,4,5 men) on host available

Idk about the usual rating list process, but the idea would be to run the Pi 24/7, with several divisions of engines (depending on how many engines participate) alternating, the top n engines promote, the bottom n engines demote, to evaluate new engines STS 1-15 v5 could be used, and running the alternating divisions with promote/demote could be automated in theory with bash-scripts and cutechess-cli.

With upcoming Pi hardware upgrades the RAM and disk restrictions might increase, with more engines running or higher draw rates, the time control might decrease.

Programmers can cross-compile for the Raspberry Pi, and there are emulators out there (QEMU), so to start they do not even have to own a Berry.

Maybe someone else catches on on this...

--
Srdja

[smatovic]

Bump.

--
Srdja

[xr_a_y]

I love the idea.

[Scally]

Watching with interest …

Al

[Dariusz]

Srdja, I like the idea very much!

Struggling engines on such a relatively slow computer today, that would be something!
In the 90's, when I was coding in assembler the Commodore 64 computer and disk drive (1541), it was an art to achieve beautiful results, as you can see from the demoscene, which still works today.
I think struggling engines on such a cheap and accessible platform would be very inspiring. I've always been curious about how powerful a chess engine could be running on an old/slow computer.

I'm personally carrying around the idea of getting such a computer, although I don't yet know where to start, what exact parameters it should have, etc. If someone could suggest something on this topic, it would be great.

[smatovic]

[...]
as you can see from the demoscene, which still works today.
[...]

Hehe, the Polish demohackers were/are the best

And I agree, with the Berry it would be an interesting kind of competition.

--
Srdja

[Dariusz]

[...]
as you can see from the demoscene, which still works today.
[...]

Hehe, the Polish demohackers were/are the best

And I agree, with the Berry it would be an interesting kind of competition.

--
Srdja

hehehe

[towforce]

A lot of old equipment emulators can be set to run at a particular speed. If one of these could be tested and shown to do this accurately on multiple different types of hardware, then this emulator would be absolutely ideal for this task, and there would be no need for testers to buy Raspberry Pi computers.

[smatovic]

[...]

Yea, I am in, lets take some 8-bit oldie like Atari 800 and run a programmers tournament

But the Raspberry Pi is more edgy, CPU+VPU+GPU, I doubt neural network inference will make sense in any emulator running on a minimal PC.

--
Srdja

[smatovic]

Bump. Maybe someone else catches on on this.

--
Srdja