Exeter Chess Club: Trawled from the 'Net

From info!strath-cs!ftel.co.uk!warwick!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!psgrain!nntp.teleport.com!geoffw Fri Jan 26 09:39:44 GMT 1996
Article: 6760 of rec.games.chess.misc
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From: geoffw@teleport.com (Geoffrey P. Wyatt)
Newsgroups: rec.games.chess.computer,rec.games.chess.misc
Subject: MCP5: Pentium 75 vs 120
Date: 22 Jan 1996 22:56:56 GMT
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An interesting exercise is going on on one of the threads of 
rec.games.chess.computer.  Don Getkey proposed finding out how long
it would take various programs to find the winning move in a certain
position he provided (White: Kb1,Qe6,Rd1,Rg3,Bd3,Nc3,Nf3,Pb2,Pd4,Pe5,
Pf4,Pg2; Black: Kg8,Qa5,Rc8,Rf8,Be7,Bf7,Nc6,Pa3,Pa7,Pd5,Pg6,Ph7).

It is white to play and find the winning sacrifice, a "box" move fairly 
obvious to humans but not to computers since, among other things, it
does not end in quick forced mate.   Don's MChess Pro 5 found the winning
move in about 7 hours, running on a Pentium 75, 8 megs RAM.  Some other
computers tested failed to find the move in 12 to 24 hours!

What is interesting is that my MCP5 found the move in 1 hour, 41 minutes.
But I'm running it on a Pentium 120, 16 megs RAM.  So at least with this
particular problem, the Pentium 120 resulted in a 4-fold faster search!

I'm somewhat surprised that the difference is this great.  I'd like to
ask Bob Hyatt or other knowledgable people to comment.  Also, if
anyone would like to test Genius 4, Rebel 7, or others on this problem, 
of course that would be interesting.  Thanks!

Geoff Wyatt
Portland, Oregon
Secretary, Oregon Chess Federation

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