Re: strength of chess computer programs vs. time

"Beliavsky" <beliavsky@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1184935250.095778.13500@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Deep Fritz defeated Kramnik in a match by 4-2 and plays at least at a
2800 level at classical time controls. Can someone estimate how much
stronger it would be if it had much more thinking time, say 1 day per
move?

There wont be much increase. Not like what you'd want.

Do a google search for: computer chess "technology curve"

In the old days (70's & 80's) an increase in search depth (by extra time,
faster system, whatever) mean a straight increase in play strength. Linear
growth.

Roughly 100 elo for every extra ply.

However, that quickly changed. By the late 80s onward, it was fairly
obvious it was a curve and not linear.

The more powerful the computers got, and the better the programs, the slower
the strength improvements came.

There was a 'deminishing returns' to the growth of the machine power /
search time.

It didn't really flatten out, but it definetly went from a straight line
(linear) to a much more of a curve with progressively slower growth.

Probably one of the better papers on this in the early days is Szabo &
Szabo: "The Technology Curve Revisited" in ICJA v11#1 (March 1988). Later
tests were done, of course, but this is probably one of the first better
ones to show a curve instead of a linear growth.

Not everybody can agree on the exact shape of the curve, but these days,
nobody in their right mind would expect a linear or even near linear growth.
There has been way too much research showing diminishing returns.

So, to answer your question....

Since the program is strong on its own, and assuming the system it runs on
is powerful, that gets us firmly away from the linear growth and into the
curve.

I would guess probably 100-150 elo, but that's a guess that I have no data
to actually back it up with. Realistically you'd have to try it and find
out. And you'd have to turn off "thinking on oppoent's time". And play
hundreds of games. Considering the time limits, that's not practical unless
you have a few hundred spare identical systems and are willing to wait half
a year for the results.

(And no, you can't reduce the time limits to get approximate results. 3
minutes to 24 hours is 480x. You can't go 1 second and 480 seconds. That
would put the weaker program into a much different part of the curve and it
wouldn't be able to play like it has been tuned to play.)

(Also note that parallel chess programs follow a similar growth. The first
few processors help a lot and as you add more, they help less and less.
Modern search algorithms are better than they used to be, but using 64
processors instead of 8 is not going to make the program vastly stronger.)



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