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Re:Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Ka... by criddell on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:36AM (#50351249)
I wonder how far back you can go? Could a modern chess engine run on a Cray 1? 386? 68k?
Re:Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Ka... by kragen on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:53AM (#50351425)
I don't think there's a meaningful difference between the Pentium and the 80386 except speed. You might have to change the compiler options a bit.

And, with more work, that's true of computers in general.

Re:Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Ka... by criddell on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:00AM (#50351481)
I understand about Turing machines.

For chess though, there are time constraints. The 386 is a lot slower. Is it fast enough?

Re:Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Ka... by kragen on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:30AM (#50351758)
That's a good question, and I don't know the answer, but I can try to guess.

An 80386 is about 10–13 Dhrystone MIPS, while a 200MHz Pentium Pro is about 90–450, according to https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html. So we're talking about a further slowdown on the order of 20×. I don't know how to estimate how much that would lower its Elo.

The article says:

> By making a number of adjustments to the algorithm and tuning it to the Pentium, we can increase its Elo to 2846 ± 35 at 1 second per move, 3109 ± 79 at 10 seconds per move, and 3180 ± 80 at 30 seconds per move.

So making it 30× faster would raise its 1-second Elo by about 334 points, and ln(30) is 3.4, so that's about 100 points per factor of e. ln(10) is 2.3, so we'd interpolate a prediction of 230 points gained at 10× faster, reasonably close to the 263 points reported.

If we extrapolate that in the other direction, ln(20) is 3.0, so on the 80386 we'd expect a loss of about 300 Elo points, down from 2846 to 2550 or so. Still enough to wipe the floor with Crafty, but low enough that Kasparov would usually beat it.

But we don't really know if that extrapolation is valid.

Re:Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Ka... by criddell on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:32AM (#50351780)
[delayed]
Re:Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Ka... by kragen on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:08AM (#50352187)
I'm guessing that Nicholas Carlini could give you a much more accurate answer by reporting its Elo with a move limit of 50 milliseconds.