[Andrew Prock]

If you really did get 60 million general evals per second on a normal machine (3 MHz or so), I'm truly impressed. But you have to keep in mind that when it come to doing poker calculations there is more to it than just plain evaluation speed. The guy with the Poker Bolide software demonstrated that recently by making a fast monte carlo evaluator, but not much else.

It's unclear what you're striving for here, or what you've achieved. There is no world record for evals/second, but even at 60 million per second, interesting poker calculations can be done much faster. PokerStove can do about 2 billion evaluations per second in the optimized Enumeration code. In the unoptimized code, it does about 10 million evals per second when enumerating. That may seem slow, but many of the calculations finish with the exact solution nearly instantly. The same can't be said for monte carlo evaluation. While PokerStove does have various lookup tables, those consist mostly of things like bit counting tables. Admittedly, the monte carlo code is not it's strong point, but there's a reason for that.

Under monte carlo, once the code is fast enough, it doesn't really matter too much if you make it twice as fast. You'll get close to the exact value quickly, but you'll never get the exact value. Said another way, doubling the number of evals won't double the convergence of the result. There are also issues of what sort of RNG you use, and equally important how you use it. Getting the RNG problem wrong can mean that your monte carlo simulations converge to the wrong result.

If you can calculate the exact value, you're usually much better off, assuming you can actually calculate it quickly enough. The nice thing is that many of the interesting questions the people ask about poker are computable using exact enumeration, and can be done in a reasonable amount of time. In a lot of ways that was the whole point of PokerStove. If you know what you are trying to calculate, you can do it significantly faster by taking the whole calculation into consideration instead of just relying on fast 7 card hand evaluators. Unfortunatly, not all things can be calculated exactly in a short period of time, and for those you often have to resort to monte carlo, precomputation, or other methods.

If you look at the work of eastbay and bachfan, you can see that they've done a great job in actually answering questions that people want to ask. As for your software, until you make it public in some fashion, it'll mean the world to you, but not much to the world. That's certainly not a bad thing. I have a lot of software which isn't public either. And it does mean quite a bit to me.

On the other hand, all this thread has piqued my curiosity. I'v never really tried to make a fast general purpose evaluator. I wonder how fast I could make it?

- Andrew