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Subject: Re: Smarter programs not bigger TBs

Author: Arndra L. Sharp

Date: 14:22:09 04/10/00

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On April 10, 2000 at 15:52:18, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>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).

Does anyone sell all the TBs on CDs?  Surely everyone who has them is not
generating them with the program that comes with the 32-bit Chessbase programs.
That would take several weeks and a memory ladened machine; I can't imagine
downloading 8 gig either.



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