Re:Chess-playing neural network LC0 beats Stockfish in 100-g...
by mot524 on Thursday May 30, 2019 @05:50PM
(#20056254)
Implementing Stockfish's evaluation function on a GPU is almost certainly possible, but stupid. Stockfish is able to evaluate several million nodes per second. By the time it identified a position to evaluate and copied it to the GPU, it could have already finished evaluating it on the CPU.
But a GPU can evaluate many positions in parallel... great... not helpful here because you don't know which positions you need to evaluate.
This is a case of apples and oranges. CPUs are good at running conventional chess engines and GPUs aren't, that's just a fact and there's no way around it. GPUs are good at running some stuff like neural networks, so, great.
If you need to run a neural network engine (LC0) then run it on a GPU, if you need to run a conventional engine, then run it on a CPU. Which is what people are doing now. Trying to change this is nonsensical, and trying to argue about which has more compute power makes as much sense as arguing about whether a car can drive on water better than a boat can drive on land.
But a GPU can evaluate many positions in parallel... great... not helpful here because you don't know which positions you need to evaluate.
This is a case of apples and oranges. CPUs are good at running conventional chess engines and GPUs aren't, that's just a fact and there's no way around it. GPUs are good at running some stuff like neural networks, so, great.
If you need to run a neural network engine (LC0) then run it on a GPU, if you need to run a conventional engine, then run it on a CPU. Which is what people are doing now. Trying to change this is nonsensical, and trying to argue about which has more compute power makes as much sense as arguing about whether a car can drive on water better than a boat can drive on land.