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+--- Thread: Is my computer borked? (/thread-9190.html)
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Is my computer borked? - Rhydderch Hael - 03-10-2004
When I run Defrag or the like, I have to kill all background programs before the attempt. It seems that whenever one of those background programs accessed the disk, doing whatever junk they do, it re-set the Defrag process to the beginning.
May I suggest you kill everything in the background prior to running thisâ the program may have to start anew whenever something new gets written into the drive.
Is my computer borked? - BloodKlot - 03-10-2004
Does Hyperthreading technology take care of a lot of the fragmentation of files? cuz I haven't defragged in a while and I checked to see how bad it was and it looked hardly fragged. I'm a ninja :ph34r:
Is my computer borked? - BloodKlot - 03-10-2004
Ninja or not, this post was edited due to inappropriate content.
-Griselda
Is my computer borked? - Bob - 03-10-2004
when last I checked, HT was concerned with bunging data in and out o the processor faster for faster processing speed, which would have nothing, whatsoever, to do with where, physically, data gets written to your harddisk
-Bob
Is my computer borked? - Mirajj - 03-13-2004
*Chuckles* I have a 6GB HD. The same one that came with the comp when I bought it 6 years ago. It's only about 1/4 full, too. I have very little permanent data on my comp. I can't imagine someone needing/using/filling up a 180GB HD. But that's just me.
Is my computer borked? - --Pete - 03-13-2004
Hi,
I can't imagine someone needing/using/filling up a 180GB HD
Table bases for chess endings, just up to 9 pieces, take up over 50 GB. Any half serious chess player can use well over 100 GB without even trying. :)
--Pete
Is my computer borked? - Drasca - 05-24-2004
What did you do pre-millenium then? Have a personal tree farms for chess printouts?
I use up a lot of HD space for nearly uncompressed video, but this begs the question... what did you do before!?!? Play chess without archiving?
Is my computer borked? - --Pete - 05-24-2004
Hi,
Well, first of all these are not archives of games. These are tables each containing the complete tree of all possible sequences of end games consisting of a given combination of pieces (i.e., all end games with two kings and a pawn, etc.). Each table takes a long time to generate, too long to do in game, but once generated can be referenced rapidly.
What these tables do is make it possible for the computer to play "perfectly" once the material has been reduced to what is in a table. Or, in other words, play end games and end game puzzles perfectly. Something that had been lacking. Openings are well served by "books" and mid game by heuristics, but computers had been playing very poor end games which people play mostly using pattern recognition. Thus the need for this "brute force" approach.
What did we do before? We put up with poor end game play. And before that we put up with poor chess play from computers. And before that, we didn't play computers at all because we didn't have them to play against. Progress in technology is funny that way, it opens possibilities that didn't exist before. Since none of these possibilities have to do with basic survival or reproduction, they are "unimportant" in the greater sense and we could muddle on without them :)
--Pete
Is my computer borked? - Bob - 05-24-2004
sow wouldn't it be easier (if infeasable) to make a database of every single possible game, and just write a computer to pick a move which gives it the highest percenatge of game endings where it wins, and the occasional random thing to stop the game getting boring?
Surely with todays processing power & storage it would be possible (anyone know what the total possible count of chess games is?)
-Bob
Is my computer borked? - yangman - 05-24-2004
Oh, the awards that a person doing that successfully, in his life-time, could win...
The theoretical number of possible board-configurations in chess is calculated to be well over the theoretical count of atoms in the universe. The problem of chess is often used to demonstrate how there's things that just can't be done in computing by brute-force (read: generate all possible configurations and then pick from them). The problem is finitely bounded, but that is not to say it is practically solvable.
IIRC, beginning from the start, the number of all possible board-configurations grow exponentially at a factor of around 16. No where near Go, but still adds up very quickly.
Is my computer borked? - --Pete - 05-24-2004
Hi,
That is, in effect, what tablebases do. They look at all possible combinations of positions with some number of pieces. The 50 gig or so that I have consider all cases with up to 8 pieces (total for both sides and including the two kings). Now, for king knight versus king knight bishop it takes less than 1 kilobyte. For king rook bishop versus king 3 knights bishop, it takes almost 2 gigabytes. And, remember, each tablebase depends on those "under" it, i.e., when one piece is lost by either side, the tablebase for the reduced number of pieces is used.
So, if going from 5 pieces to 8 increases it by a factor of a million, consider what going from 8 to 32 (a full board) would do. Even if the calculation could be done, where would you store the results?
--Pete
Is my computer borked? - NiteFox - 05-25-2004
Rhydderch Hael,Mar 10 2004, 12:37 AM Wrote:When I run Defrag or the like, I have to kill all background programs before the attempt. It seems that whenever one of those background programs accessed the disk, doing whatever junk they do, it re-set the Defrag process to the beginning.And the Lord created Safe Mode and all was good. Amen.
May I suggest you kill everything in the background prior to running thisâ the program may have to start anew whenever something new gets written into the drive.
Seriously, run defrag in Safe Mode. That's how you maintain sanity.
Though... I have two HDs; the 2GB drive that came with the computer and a 20GB split into three partitions, all nearly full. Last time I defragged, the two partitions I did took about four hours less than the 2GB primary. Sucks.