Computer speed

[Compgo123@xxxxxxx]

At present time, the speed of computer is not yet a crucial problem in 
computer Go. However, soon or later it will become the bottle neck in 
improving the program strength. As we discussed before one cannot expect 
signifcant improvement (with a factor of 100 or larger) in computer speed 
from computer manufacturers in short time. On the other hand, there are 
several potential ways to significantly improve a program's speed, such as 
FPGA's etc. With these devices the key in program speed improvement is the 
parallel processing and the speeding up of memory access. Before significant 
advance can be made in this area, one has to lay down the basic principles. 
When I look into a Go program,  most of the excution time is spent on memory 
access related operations. Next important operations are the logical 
operations involing 'if(...)' type of commands. Arithmatic operations are 
only a small part of a Go program (in influence calculations). Here the cache 
memory of a computer apparently helps a lot. The same time, it's potential 
has already reached the limit. One cannot expect much improvement from it. 
Thus, the question of the day is that how can one significantly improve the 
memory access from the hardware point of view? No, I'm not talking about a 
facotr of 2 or 5. I'm talking about a factor of 100 or more.


Dan Liu