Author: Vasik Rajlich
Date: 11:35:10 05/05/04
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On May 05, 2004 at 07:12:22, Tord Romstad wrote: >On May 05, 2004 at 05:11:53, Vasik Rajlich wrote: > >>On May 04, 2004 at 12:40:09, Tord Romstad wrote: >> >>>But in fact, I prefer not to use TBs even at the PC, for aesthetical >>>reasons. Using more than 1 MB of disk space just in order to play KQKR >>>endgames perfectly is really ugly. >> >>Of course same could be said for alpha-beta, and searching 20 million positions >>just to move a rook to an open file. (Ok, 5 million for Gothmog.) > >Aesthetics is always a subjective thing, of course. My personal preference >is to always let the engine figure out as much as possible by itself, based >on general knowledge without too many complicated special cases. A huge >lookup table containing the exact number of plies to mate for all KQKR >positions is about as far from general knowledge as you can possibly come. > >Tord Well, for KQKR I'm sure you can in a few hours come up with something effective, even at low search depths. However, for things like KRPKR and KPPKP, tablebases are a really nice solution that you won't easily replace. Note also that 20 elo points is nothing to scoff at. If you speed up your engine by 40%, that's about what you'll gain, and we've seen how far some people will go to get this. You're probably at the point with Gothmog where you'll happily work for a month to get a ten-point increase. Re. the aesthetics, you can also think of tablebases as far more general than any heuristics you'll come up with to replace them. The tablebase code knows only about mates and draws, and its search figures out the rest. It's just an implementation detail that you precompute the results. :-) Vas
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