I think the whole concept of taking on performance per watt in
the restricted domain of Go playing programs is silly. Are we to
spend our time searching for the Transmeta cores and porting
to those?
Saving energy is a fine thing. Lets leave that to various hardware
engineers in the semiconductor industry. Or, if you think this is
such a grand idea then you should offer up the prize money and
then we can all see who comes to compete for it.
Lets stick to writing algorithms and use time restrictions in play
against each other and against humans for our metrics. It is not
the case that a successful algorithm on one CPU is a good one
for putting on a cluster. Different people will try different things,
some on one CPU, some to take advantage of the newer multi-core
CPUs, and some will try things on multiple CPUs. It is all good,
and these things are not directly interchangeable. I invite you to
spend a few hours debugging an MPI application if you think
there is a simple relationship between the power of the computer
and the strength of the program.
Putting a V12 engine in a soap-box derby car will not make it win.
It is not that simple.
Cheers,
David
On 14, Jan 2009, at 11:58 AM, Ryan Grant wrote:
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:22 AM, David Doshay <ddos...@mac.com> wrote:
if the competitions are all on the same hardware you are running a
*Go -playing-programs-developed-on-that-platform* competition.
And that sounds silly to me.
it would be worthwhile for this community to reward authors of
efficient algorithms.
authors of the best algorithms, once clearly identified, could
line up for grants to port to larger architectures, to see
whether their work scales. newcomers would have a strong
incentive to try their ideas, even if they're not aligned with
large computing resources. while we don't currently have such
funding, clear community demand would be an important step in
realizing it.
for any architecture, we can measure which algorithms are getting
the best results, per rough unit of computation resources. one
very honest measurement is electricity. electricity can be
estimated where it is not closely measured.
here is a thread from July which tries to outline this in more
detail:
Elo-joules / honest clusters / Re: tournaments
http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2008-July/015357.html
arrange a "Green Computer Go" tournament, in which the
wattage used by each machine is well monitored. play a
marathon to calculate rankings, then normalize based on each
contestant's sum of game-relative joules. the best "Elo /
joules" ratio determines the winner.
--
- Ryan
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
computer-go@computer-go.org
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
computer-go@computer-go.org
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
