Parallel game tree search on SIMD machines

Abstract

We describe an approach to the parallelization of game tree search on SIMD machines. It turns out that the single-instruction restriction of SIMD-machines is not a big obstacle for achieving efficiency. We achieve speedups up to 5850 on a 16K processor MasPar MP-1 if the search trees are sufficiently large and if there are no strong move ordering heuristics. To our best knowledge, the largest speedups previously reported (usually on MIMD machines) are more than an order of magnitude smaller.