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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

That was a trick Dave Fotland used in the '80s to make his Go program, "Many Faces of Go", faster. He donated some key code from his evaluation function to SPEC and they used it as one of the parts in the SPEC integer CPU benchmarks. CPU makers tweaked CPUs to do well on those benchmarks, and hence on his code.

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I've talked with him about those days... Though I haven't chatted with him about Go since AlphaGo flipped the whole world over.

I worked very hard on pulling the same trick at Sony. We'd made Vegas scriptable, and, once it was part of Bapco's Sysmark, we received immense support from chip vendors. Machines, engineers, tools, instructions added to instruction sets... It was a nutty time.

Of course, the biggest wins worked everywhere, like the 6755399441055744 single precision rounding trick, or the use of memory mapped file regions to cache the rendering tree. Still, becoming part of a performance benchmark is a great way to get attention.

I highly recommend this article in that same vein

http://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditio...

This is when Chrome on Android finally started to turn a corner, they've done a fantastic job. JS perf has increased 50% from 2016 to 2018 in Chrome/Android. Sadly Android is still hamstrung by extremely mediocre Qualcomm SoCs but they've made huge strides on the software side.

I was confused by the words "Go Program" "in the '80s" in one sentence. OP is talking here about the Go board game played by a computer AI.

Not talking about Go language.

That's a wonderful bit of social engineering.

I had to read that comment a couple times before I realized you were referring to the board game and not the programming language :)

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