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Subject: Re: Why ... egtb format ...

Author: Marc Bourzutschky

Date: 08:23:25 04/03/04

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On April 02, 2004 at 20:17:44, Johan de Koning wrote:

>On April 02, 2004 at 04:58:25, Sune Fischer wrote:
>
>>On April 02, 2004 at 02:13:53, Johan de Koning wrote:
>>
>>>But as Theron pointed out some years ago, one should avoid *any*
>>>probe inside a search.
>>
>>Do you recall the argument?
>
>Blindly probing after captures results in lots of redundant probes.
>Most positions are way off balance (outside [alpha,beta]) and are
>interesting only if a 1 or 3 ply tactic exists.
>
>About 2 years ago Chritophe posted he was working/planning on a
>set of rules to decide for each material config whether to probe
>or not (depending on local depth I guess). Then he went on doing
>Palm stuff and other, more important, improvements.
>
>The idea is sound I think, because 1 probe that misses the EGDB
>cache is already awfully expensive. But on the other hand, with
>6 men, building a set of rules (more imprtantly exceptions) will
>be quite a daunting task.
>
>... Johan

A set of general rules will be difficult, but it is a fact that when analyzing
endgame studies programs that probe tablebases beyond the root perform
significantly better, because almost by definition the probed positions will
often be non-trivial.  But perhaps those of us who use comps for such analysis
are in the minority compared to people who run engine-engine "tournaments" or
hardware contests on the servers...

-Marc



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