Re: [computer-go] Using floating point sounds very strange to me

[Arend Bayer <arend.bayer@xxxxxx>]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, chrilly wrote:

> >On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> >
> >> You guys are making jokes i hope about using floating point in
> evaluation.
> >>
> >> Nothing as slow and non deterministic like floating point. Additional
> >> certain compilers will use all kind of tricks with floating point giving
> >> massive roundoff errors.
> >
> >Surely you must be joking that these problem are relevant for the move
> >valuation in GNU Go.
> >
> This is really a clash of culture. I do not know any chess programmer who
> uses floating point. It really shocked me that someone is doing evaluation
> this way. In Deep Blue the material-value of a pawn was set to 128. Hydra

Well, there is also a certain clash of discussion cultures between "I
hope you are joking" and "It really shocked me...". :))

The move valuation is really way beyond 0.0001% of the total run time of
gnugo, so the performance discussion started by Vincent is really
irrelevant in this context.

> In a chess programm 3 things are importan: Speed, speed and speed. In a go
> programm things are obviously different.

As Paul already said, we do care a lot about speed; but with caveats. We
would be unlikely to make a change that gives a 1% performance
improvement but makes debugging noticeably harder, it just isn't worth
it.

Arend

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