I haven't had time to concern myself with computer-Go the past years. I even have a hard time keeping up with this list. But today I had a few hours to kill. For work I deal a lot with the Amazon EC2 service these days. And I noticed they're not billing us for the micro instances. We mostly use their "large" instances anyway. It turns out for the first year Amazon doesn't charge for a micro instance. You probably need a credit card to open an account but then you have a free Linux instance for a year. Normally they charge $0.02 per hour (comes down to $15 for a month full-time use) or less when you 'reserve' usage ahead of time.
I remember a while back there was some discussion about holding a competition on equal hardware. This may be a good and cheap, maybe even free, way to arrange something like this. I didn't really have a clue as to how fast these micro instances are so while I had a little time I decided to give it a little spin. I set up a micro instance and installed some basic packages on it, like git and make. I downloaded Libego, compiled it (something I never managed on my Mac) and ran its benchmark. It literally didn't take me more than 15 minutes in all from starting the instance to running Libego. It reported 27kpps and 10kpps per Ghz. This seems to point to a 2.66Ghz processor underneath. Not terribly exciting, but not too bad either (hey, it's free!). The numbers seemed a bit low. So I looked in the code and modified it so that it did just playouts and didn't use the sampler (I didn't bother to find out what the sampler was for) and the numbers improved a bit to 44kpps and 16kkps per Ghz. Next I uploaded a Java jar with the refbot I made some years back. That recorded 27kkps for plain playouts. It does compute real liberties, not pseudo like Libego, but that's minor. My Mac does around 11-12 kkps per Ghz for the Java version, so that looked fairly normal to me. I thought Libego did more like 40 kkps per Ghz, so that surprised me a bit. Maybe others can tell me if this sounds about right for Libego. Anyway, I thought maybe some if you might be interested in this. I know that not everyone would favor a competition on equal hardware, but I think it would be an interesting alternative. Mark Boon _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
