Draw!

An anonymous reader writes "Heise (publisher of the famous german computer magazine c't) started a most unusual CPU benchmark, today. A dual P4 Xeon 2400 and a dual AthlonMP 2000+ have to prove their abilities to ... play chess! The opponents are running two of the best chess AIs (Previews of Deep Fritz 7 and Shredder 6), so there are four different configurations. With each configuration about 55 matches (~24h) are played. As yet AMD/Fritz is leading, but the benchmark has just started. You can follow the duell online [Sorry, site is in german, but the graphics of the java-applet should be multi-lingual]. What's next? Who wouldn't like to see a Linux/Windows mine sweeper death match!"

Comments

Time is limited

[nniillss]

For each game, both opponents have 10 minutes in total plus 2 seconds per move. Everything else being equal (or symmetric, with all combinations of programs being used) it is not too far fetched to assume that the faster machine wins on average

Update: submission is from yesterday

[nniillss]

The first match ended with a slight advantage for Shredder/Intel versus Fritz/AMD: 20 wins, 22 losses, 29 draws. The present match is for the flipped combinations: now Shredder/AMD leads with 11 wins, 7 losses, and 8 draws against Fritz/Intel. These results indicate a superiority of the AMD architecture (2x Athlon MP 2000+) over the Intel architecture (2x Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz) (see here) which would be in line with the chess SPECINT result.

Note that both programs learn from game to game within each match, but are reset after the match. In the first match, Shredder started very weak and had a steeper learning curve against Fritz. Since in the second match Shredder/AMD already started strong, a landslide victory for this combination appears likely.

Chess games are finite

[yerricde]

all this processing power, and i'm watching two computers too stupid to draw.

Chess has several ko rules that will end the game after no progress. For instance, if twenty-five rounds have passed without a capture or pawn move, or if the same board position has appeared three times, the game is a draw.