Distributed Chess Computing Project

jcarley writes "Just found an interesting project that is looking to capitalise on the power of unused computing cycles to develop a strong chess playing computer. Given the power in single and dual CPU chess programmes these days, if they can find a good way to efficiently parallel the anaysis this could be interesting. "

Comments

Naturally Parallelizable

[dustman]

I have thought of this myself, although I'm too lazy to implement it.

Chess is extremely parallelizable, since each of your N possible moves must be evaluated seperately, you can divide them among your K cpus which are participating... (Deep Blue had 256 CPUS, if I recall correctly)

The only major penalty for a distrubuted venture such as this that I can think of is that cached board information can't be shared across nodes... Most chess computers cache the results of evaluating different board positions, so that you don't need to (re-)evaluate everything for different move orders which end up with the same board position.

How does it work?

[GGardner]

This page has lots of paragraphs about distributed computing this, and xmlrpc that, and pretty animated gifs showing binary ones and zeros zipping from one computer to the other, but NOTHING about the actual algorithms or chess going on.

What is it actually doing? A complete tree-search for all the legal chess moves? That's a pretty big tree! Searching for conclusions to well-known games? Trying to crack into a Norwegian librarian's database?

Re:Is it possible to "solve" chess?

[ryants]

Consider:

There are something like 10^120 positions (nodes in the search space) (source: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Jackson) and something like 10^78 atoms in the universe (source: The Little Book of the Big Bang, Hogan).

So if every atom in the universe could do one chess position per say, nanosecond (10^-9 seconds), and had been computing since the Big Bang (15 billion years ago), the computation would still be in its earliest stages.

(Note: I stole this argument from somewhere, but can't find the exact quote or reference.)