Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Smarter programs not bigger TBs

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 12:52:18 04/10/00

Go up one level in this thread


On April 10, 2000 at 11:20:51, Arndra L. Sharp wrote:

>First of all let me state that I am not a programmer, just someone who enjoys
>computer chess immensely.  I have seen a lot of posts that put down the Endgame
>Turbo disks because they do not contain all of the TBs, in particular those TBs
>after the pawn queens.  I think it a good idea to reduce the hard drive space
>required for TBs by pruning those TBs that any good chess program can figure out
>if its brain was not disabled.  It seems the real problem is that those programs
>that use TBs turn off the permanent brain once the program is in a TB position
>and then the program gets confused if after a pawn queens and the now simple win
>(for good chess programs) is not in the TB folder.  This is something that the
>programmers probably did not anticipate originally everyone has seen games where
>this impacts the result. Now that this has been identified, why can't the
>programmers tell their programs to follow the TB tree to pawn promotion and
>reset the permanent brain at that point.  Many people have reported that the
>programs that blunder with missing 5 man TBs play the same ending fine with 3
>and 4 man TBs.  It just seems that the programs don't know how to think again
>after they start down a tree and the tree ends before checkmate.  A bug fix by
>the programmers would be more preferable than taking up another 5 gigs of hard
>drive space.
>
>Arndra


Crafty does this correctly.  But with the price of disk drives, holding all the
3-4-5 piece files is now trivial...  40 gigs for 250 bucks is typical now.  You
only need 8 gigs for _all_ the 3-4-5 piece files (compressed).



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.