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Subject: Re: Value of 2-bit tables

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 18:39:06 02/02/01

Go up one level in this thread


On February 02, 2001 at 14:43:39, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:

>On February 01, 2001 at 21:02:42, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On January 31, 2001 at 19:14:19, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>On January 31, 2001 at 11:36:01, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>[snip]
>>>>The idea seems pretty good for 3-4 piece files, and even for 5 piece files
>>>>although the memory to hold them becomes prodigous.  But 6's are hopeless
>>>>as todays machines are no better at probing a 1gb file than they are at
>>>>probing a 1 terrabyte file.
>>>
>>>It might be worthwhile to store them in a real database with hashed index.
>>>
>>>Modern database systems will cache database requests very efficiently, and so I
>>>think it might be doable.  The database model would be the hard part (finding a
>>>representation which is still highly compact like the tablebase files)
>>
>>If you don't store it in 2 bits but only win/draw/loss (in diep
>>i only generate legal moves so i can never get to illegal positions)
>>then you can store 5 positions instead of 4 in a single byte.
>>
>>Those compress very good. experiments of mine so far come down to
>>the size of 1 CD of 650mb for all 3,4,5 men.
>>
>
>I would guess that after compression the 4 per byte tables would be only
>slightly larger than 5 per byte tables, and might not be worth the extra
>decoding effort.

about 20%-25% more space you need for 4 per byte as for 5 per byte
if i may guess.

So for a very simplistic step you save 20% that's worth it of course!
And it doesn't eat a 15mb RAM table or something which takes 30
seconds to get generated at program startup!

So it sure is worth doing it!

>>Your first big safe is the size in which you store. the second big big
>>safe is the better compression.
>>
>>Of course you can get them down even quite smaller but then you can't
>>quickly read them during a game unless you keep everything in RAM as
>>you need to do binary search on the positions then,
>>which no user except a few freaks with the latest
>>computers will do.
>>
>>The problem remains however generation. Also you'll not win KNNKP
>>that's the only price you pay when talking about 5 men :)
>
>If you have the HD space, it would be better to have both WLD and full tables,
>and always use the full table at the root.

HD space isn't the problem at all for generation.

To generate a 6 men like the nightmare ones with just 1 pawn
and not the same pieces of same side one needs only a few tens
of GIGABYTES in total for generation at most as after generation
they all get compressed so bigtime that even the conversion to other 6 men
only takes very little compared to the uncompressed bitmaps and other
stuff for generation.

However the generation is the real problem, apart from needing near to
a gigabyte of RAM at least... ...at this moment i don't have a computer
left to generate them, not to mention 80 or 40mb/s SCSI harddisks

Generation of a single 6 men with 1 pawn is a nightmare, it is taking
between 1 and 2 weeks assuming a gigabyte of RAM... ...and a very
fast harddisk and cpu...

Greetings,
Vincent



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