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Subject: Re: Evaluating KQ vs QR unnecessary?

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 01:29:57 05/06/04

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On May 06, 2004 at 01:42:24, Jouni Uski wrote:

>IMHO when all 4 piece TBs are 30 MB EVERYBODY has enough RAM (or disk space at
>least) for them.

No.  My mobile phone doesn't have enough RAM or disk space.  Neither does my
Palm.

>Isn't it totally unnecessary to include any knowledge for basic endings?

If you intend to only run your engine on fast machines with huge amounts of
disk space and memory, and you expect all your users to download the complete
4 piece TBs (a big download for those who use dialup accounts), you might be
right.  But even then, I think it is likely that spending some effort on
evaluating basic endgames well can be very useful.  Studying the basic
endgames is probably a good way to discover and develop evaluation rules
and principles which are useful even in more complicated endgames.

Another point is that some programmers, including myself, simply don't like
TBs, for several reasons.  Apart from the reasons I have already mentioned
in other threads, I would like to point out the simple but important fact
that I did not write the TB code myself.  I don't even have any idea how
Nalimov's code works.  To me, there is no point at all in letting all basic
endgames by using TBs.  I wouldn't learn anything at all by doing this.

>Even Chessbase GUI handles them itself - no code is even needed!

This is incorrect.  The Chessbase GUI in itself doesn't help you much,
because it only enables you to probe the TBs at the root of the tree.  If
the engine wants to handle all basic endgames by probing TBs, it needs to
be able to probe TBs inside the tree.  The Chessbase GUI cannot help you
do this.

Like so often, you also seem to forget that not all of us have any Windows
computers to play with.  All the Chessbase programs are Windows-only.

Tord




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