Re: computer-go: question -- Oracle of Life and Death FPGA

[Vincent Diepeveen <diep@xxxxxxxxx>]

Any program in hardware is of course a few thousands time faster in
hardware than in software. Please don't compare 60Mhz FPGA with
700Mhz of a sequential general CPU. In hardware you can do an evaluation
with many patterns in a few clocks, where the equivalent in software
is many hundreds of thousands of clocks.

Vincent

At 11:33 AM 12/12/99 EST, you wrote:
>>From my own experience, a life death search is quite involved and need to
be 
>very adaptable. It's not very well defined yet .Thus make it difficult to 
>implement in a FPGA. To justify a special hardware, the speed improvement 
>should be at least a factor of 10. The clock speed of present FPGA's is
about 
>60 MHz. Thus, a parallel factor of 10 will only make a FPGA equivalent to a 
>700 MHz cpu.  I think the most suitable algorithms to implement in special 
>hardwares are the utility routines in computer Go. For example, the group 
>structure is well defined and standardized. However, to maintain the group 
>structures and it's properties needs lengthy calculations. If these 
>calculations can be implemented in a special hardware the improvement to 
>overall speed will be tremendous. As Clay Chipsmith pointed out, this can be 
>approached in three ways. Parellel cpus, FPGA's, and special hardwares. FPGA 
>is somewhere between the first and the third approaches. I did some reading 
>about the FPGAs. It seems more adapted to implement digital parallel 
>calculations.  It's not quite yet adapted to exploit the geometric
structures 
>of the Go board. Thus, a special hardware will be the most ideal way to 
>approach the problem. The general structure of this special hardware can be 
>worked out easily. The problem is where to find the resources to implement
it.
>
>
>
>Dan Liu
>
>
Vincent Diepeveen
diep@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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... en verder ben ik van ben ik van mening dat Dap het gesticht in moet