[computer-go] 19x19 Study

[Joshua Shriver]

I'd be willing to donate some CPU time. I run Ubuntu linux on a P4 3ghz with
1gig RAM. Can be configured with or w/o HT. (usually leave it off)

-Josh

On Jan 29, 2008 10:01 AM, Don Dailey <drdailey at cox.net> wrote:

> The 9x9 scalability study has been a huge success with 35 cpu's
> participating and several volunteers.    This means we got about a month
> of testing done per day and have the equivalent of about a years worth
> of data or more.    We are considering whether to extend the study a bit
> more to test some more versions of Mogo.   Here are the results so far:
>
>    http://cgos.boardspace.net/study/
>
> There are over 7000 games played at very high levels.     If there is
> enough interest,  I will collect all the games together in one place and
> make them available when the study is complete.   (This depends on all
> the participants sending me a copy of their database(s).)
>
> It appears that mogo, despite internal limits, continues to scale beyond
> the point where we are currently testing.    It's my understanding that
> because of memory limits mogo must garbage collect tree nodes that could
> be useful later,  and this would impact the strength at higher levels.
> Nevertheless the rating plot tells the story,  mogo scales wonderfully,
> but not linearly and you can see a nice gradual curve in the plot.
>
> Now we have something we can argue about for weeks.   Why is it not
> mostly linear?   Could it be the memory issue I just mentioned?    Or as
> David Fotland suggests,  perhaps we are close enough to the limit that
> additional strength increases are hard to come by?     My guess is that
> it is a combination of both factors.    At the current level of the
> strongest mogo version,   mogo takes roughly an hour per game, or about
> 45 minutes on a core 2 duo.     That probably translates to perhaps a
> couple of minutes per move.
>
> FatMan seems to hit some kind of hard limit rather suddenly.     It
> could be an implementation bug or something else - I don't really
> understand this.     It's very difficult to test a program for
> scalability since you are limited by computer resources and it turned
> out that this was a great opportunity to discover this.    Of course
> this is something else we can argue about :-)
>
> When this study is complete,   we would like to do a 19x19 study.   It
> seems pragmatic to have 2 programs in the study,  just as we do in the
> 9x9 study.     We already have mogo,  but we are looking for someone to
> volunteer their program for the study.    Here is what we need:
>
> 1.  One of the stronger scalable programs.
>
> 2.  A 32 bit binary that runs on linux.     Also, a 64 bit binary if you
> can make one but not required since it appears most 64 bit linux
> machines run 32 bit binaries in most cases.
>
> 3.  No opening book or at least extremely limited (mogo always plays e5
> but that seems to be the extent of it's "hard coded" opening system.)
>
> 4.  Ability to have fine control over the number of nodes searched per
> move.
>
> 5.  Should be able to scale up without hitting a hard memory limit when
> thinking as long as 5 or 10 minutes per move.
>
> 6.  Should make reasonable use of memory.   The test machines seem to
> have about 1/2 gig of memory and 2 programs run on them - so your
> program should be able to run reasonably well on modest hardware.
>
>
> We understand that your program probably plays poorly at 19x19.   This
> should not prevent you from volunteering your program if it's one of the
> stronger 9x9 programs.
>
> We have ironed out most of the wrinkles in making this work so we would
> also like to have more volunteers to RUN the study.    If anyone want to
> help,  it works this way:
>
> 1.   Need a machine running a modern linux with at least 512 meg memory.
> 2.   It can be 32 bit or 64 bit linux.
> 3.   I send you a tarball with everything you need including the program
> themselves.
> 4.   unpack the tarball somewhere.
> 5.   run a script to start the test.
> 6.   there is a script to stop and restart the test at your convenience.
>
> There is nothing else you have to do.   The results are periodically
> ftp'd to my anonymous server for processing.
>
> - Don
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> computer-go mailing list
> computer-go at computer-go.org
> http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/attachments/20080129/56f2ee85/attachment.htm