I made a screenshot, but looks like there is no option to add it, so let me describe it instead:
From what I remember, in past, engine performance was measured in FLOPS (floating point operations per second)
However, when you do an engine analysis now, it says you stuff like "X Mn/s", i,e. some number of, I assume, "mega n per second"?
What does "n" even mean?
Do anyone have an idea what this can be about?
(edit: changed FOPLS into FLOPS, sorry for dyslexia)
(edit 4: changed dysleksia into dyslexia... sorry QwQ.. no comment :-( )
@Scarlet_Evans said in #1:
> I made a screenshot, but looks like there is no option to add it
use an image server like imgur
and with link from `.png` (for example)
and add the link in the post
> What does "n" even mean?
nodes
Thanks!
How many nodes does a FLOP have?
All that Wikipedia says is "In June 2019, Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 148.6 petaFLOPS on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs."
which looks irrelevant to the FLOPS to me.
Any idea how to relate one to another? What even is the definition of a "node"?
Maybe lichess could add coe pop-up tooltip while pointing mouse cursor on the mysterious things like this? :-)
Why I can't edit previous post to fix grammar errors, nor post a new one, as it throws an ERROR:
"Too many requests. Try again later.
Your device or network has sent too many requests in a short amount of time. Please try again later."
Please, lichess, fix your forums :-(
WHY can't you even edit what you just wrote SECONDS AGO?????????
As I only knew the name, I searched chatgpt to explain:
> Nodes are components or points of intersection in networks or computing systems, used to structure data or connect devices. Flops (Floating Point Operations Per Second) are a performance measure indicating how many mathematical floating-point operations a computer can perform per second. The main difference is that nodes refer to the structure or components of a system, while flops measure the processing capacity of that system.
A node is a term usually used when talking about graphs. In this context: chess engines usually perform some sort of graph / tree search. A node then corresponds to a chess position. So 2 MN/s roughly speaking means, the engine looks at 2 million positions per second.
These N/s don't really have anything to do with FLOPs. The latter are how many floating point operations your processor can do per second. However, the number of instructions needed to look at a chess position in the above context may vary from position to position. More importantly, chess engines don't usually use a lot of floating point operations in the first place. So a probably more relevant metric to estimate engine speed would be integer operations per second. That being said, in chess engine context, nodes per second is the overwhelmingly used metric since it directly relates to, well, how many positions the engine looks at.
Ohhh, so the flops metric was the wrong one here to begin with?!
Thanks, it actually makes sense to think about nodes of a graph, while flops can mean anything, like some floating point operations being wasted on some extra meaningless things or so!
I was always confused with what "flops" mean, but if nodes are so straightforward, then it's so simple!! Now I actually wonder why the flops were previously used in chess to begin with! xD
Thank you for replies and explanation! And sorry for me fooling around a little, just a bad day, but genuine interest in chess regardless of what is going on around me ️
Have a great day, everyone!
@Scarlet_Evans said in #8:
> Now I actually wonder why the flops were previously used in chess to begin with! xD
Are you sure it wasn't being used for chess computers (as opposed to engines)? It makes more sense as a hardware metric, rather than a software one.
