Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996? (nicholas.carlini.com)

You can technically have some then-contemporary FMV titles run on N64 with a 64MB cart. The hardware lends itself to it because it has the RSP, a secondary MIPS processor with re-programmable microcode. But the best video compression we had at the time was MPEG-2, which just wouldn't cut it.

I think this is a common trend for algorithms that are in wide use, where you have Moore's law like behavior on the hardware side and then also software optimizations that give their own order of magnitude speedups.

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post...

As it turns out, the video was encoded in such a way that it could be played back using the display bandwidth of the original PC, BUT doing that encoding required a modern computer to perform in a reasonable amount of time.

But anecdotally I'll share that one of my brother's college roomies was a consultant for RealVideo and was behind their initial codecs. He came back to them with algorithmic improvements a bit later and they just cold shouldered him saying the existing codec was good enough.

So who knows if the biz side folks at the time would have even seen value in better codecs, as unbelievable as that seems to us now in the streaming and zoom call world.

The only time when GM will definitely analyze more lines than an amateur is in a highly tactical position but that happens, again, maybe 1-3 times per typical game (tactics themselves will last several moves, but they would be largely calculated through at the beginning of the tactical melee).

What does this mean exactly? They analyze the same number but the grandmaster analyzes "only the most critical moves."

So does that mean at every given analysis opportunity (each move I guess), they analyze better candidates?

If so I guess these 2 things are totally redundant? "they analyze only the most critical moves and do a better job with that analysis."

Alternatively I wondered if perhaps they actually perform analysis on less moves (perhaps because they already know the lines or remember their previous analysis). But I think that contradicts the claim that they analyze about the same number of moves.

It's totally true that most people overestimate how much of GM's abilities comes from pure calculation, and underrate intuition. That's what it's getting at.

But in classical games GMs are, in fact, doing tons of calculation, and the statement is literally completely false.

Because this move was a money maker for all involved, all memory producers and also AMD followed immediately the Intel initiative. Memory modules without ECC would have never existed if adequate consumer protection laws had existed.

I see no reason to doubt the author here.

https://c64online.com/c64-games/sargon-ii-de/

Also notice that for events like Title Tuesday you must play on a dedicated client with at least 2 cameras, so it would be significantly harder to pull it off.

Maybe a pure neural net (no tree search at all) would stand a better chance. Shockingly, those can play at IM level.

I think this is underselling it a bit. If you'd told this to the IBM engineers at the time I think they would have taken great interest in how the performance was achieved.

ELO is like probability. A 100 ELO difference is something like 2x odds of winning a game and over a lot of tries it tends to be quite accurate. That was also an argument from Magnus Carlsen that to compare human ELO you need a lot of games and he didn't want to take part in classical world championship quoting this reason (among others).

> It clearly wasn't technical side of things that prevented that, but also I don't believe it was lack of creativity.

I don't know those specific games, but I think this often happens because, although the thing has been technically possible for decades, it used to be relatively difficult/expensive/obscure, and now it's far more accessible.

In those days, writing and publishing a SNES game was something that relatively very few people would have even thought to attempt, let alone had the knowledge and skills and capital to pull off successfully. Nowadays, creating and publishing a SNES-level game is comparatively very easy (at the technical level, that is; making a good original game is of course still hard), and so a large portion of the people with an idea and some motivation can actually go ahead and do it. And now that games are fully mainstream, there will be more of those people in the first place. Many of the resulting games won't be very interesting, but collectively we're exploring the design space much more quickly.

edit: I was probably silly to focus on literal SNES games instead of 'SNES era' games, but the point still stands: creating games for any platform back then was harder and more obscure than it is now (especially given that we're talking about a technical level that required quite efficient use of the hardware back then, but can be done with extremely inefficient use of the hardware now).

Also, don't underestimate the "juice" that these days is relatively easy to do but would be expenseive back then. Balatro has dozens of very small things going on graphically that make it feel real nice to play that most certainly not be free on SNES hardware.

And like vampire survivors is just Robotron/Smash TV with infinity number of sprites on screen. The limitation is very much hardware in that case.

Every board game could have been built thousands of years ago, at least after the dawn of some reasonable writing/drawing media. But technology in design hadn't accumulated enough. To go farther, every bit of math could have been done thousands of years ago, but new math had to draw on earlier math. New math didn't rely (much) on special paper.

Also, "hit" probably isn't a good metric. Those games might have showed up back then and just been moderately notable, like dozens or hundreds of other games were.

Game design (like other creative expressions) is the same. Each new game doesn't come from a vacuum, it's a progression from everything that has come before.

And, with more work, that's true of computers in general; they can all do the same computations once you somehow wire up enough memory: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004

A lot of support for old CPUs & platforms they're on goes through emulators like QEMU. Or plain old 'go with specs, disturb code as little as possible, and assume (hope) it still works'. But nothing beats running on actual hardware. Uncommon configurations, specific drivers that may have been broken (sometimes for a looong time before someone notices), spec says A but hardware does B, etc.