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Subject: Smarter programs not bigger TBs

Author: Arndra L. Sharp

Date: 08:20:51 04/10/00


First of all let me state that I am not a programmer, just someone who enjoys
computer chess immensely.  I have seen a lot of posts that put down the Endgame
Turbo disks because they do not contain all of the TBs, in particular those TBs
after the pawn queens.  I think it a good idea to reduce the hard drive space
required for TBs by pruning those TBs that any good chess program can figure out
if its brain was not disabled.  It seems the real problem is that those programs
that use TBs turn off the permanent brain once the program is in a TB position
and then the program gets confused if after a pawn queens and the now simple win
(for good chess programs) is not in the TB folder.  This is something that the
programmers probably did not anticipate originally everyone has seen games where
this impacts the result. Now that this has been identified, why can't the
programmers tell their programs to follow the TB tree to pawn promotion and
reset the permanent brain at that point.  Many people have reported that the
programs that blunder with missing 5 man TBs play the same ending fine with 3
and 4 man TBs.  It just seems that the programs don't know how to think again
after they start down a tree and the tree ends before checkmate.  A bug fix by
the programmers would be more preferable than taking up another 5 gigs of hard
drive space.

Arndra



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