Author: bob o
Date: 10:40:54 03/19/02
1. I think I read something (I could be wrong) where they said that someone made a program so that some 6-man tablebases could be made in chunks, so that a bunch of different programs could split up the task of making these gigantic files, kinda like those guys that are looking for aliens. Does anyone know anything about that, or was my source incorrect? 2. For Prof. Hyatt: On the ftp site, there are some tbs's for tablebases that are not available on the site; I think that they are all 5+1 files, I could be wrong... is it possible to obtain the TB files somehow? 3. When playing around with tbcomp.exe I noticed that if you decompress the downloaded files and then compress them again with large values for the size of the encode block size (the -e parameter) you can change (and reduce) the size of the files; for the 6-man files I tried so far I got very significant size savings, but I was not able to run them under crafty (I think it said something like illegal block size or something, it's been a while... I can try again to reproduce this if requested). Is it possible to compress them in this manner to get savings in file size? And if it is possible, what are the chess-playing ramifications of this? 4. Is it possible for a program to need just one of the tablebase files instead of the pair? For instance, let's say that you had an endgame of: white- ke1 pawn e2, black- ke8. And suppose you only had kpk.nbw.emd. Is it possible for the program with white to say, "Ok I know that I have a mate in N moves." Then it makes a move. Then black says "I can't find the correct TB file. But I found kpk.nbw.emd. Now let me search every possible black move for me and white's best reply, and leave him in the worst possible position." It seems that if this is possible, then you could cut the storage space in half by doing a quick 2-ply search. 5. I'm not quite clear on what info is in which TB file. For instance, let's say we have a series of kqkr endings. In which files are the following (kqkr.nbb or kqkr.nbw) 1. white's queen vs. black's rook, white to move 2. white's queen vs. black's rook, black to move 3. white's rook vs. black's queen, white to move 4. white's rook vs. black's queen, black to move Sorry if these questions were answered here before, I am a rather recent newcomer here, and I do not have a great understanding of TB files, but am fascinated by them. Thanks in advance. Bob
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