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Subject: Re: What is the limit of TB's?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 18:16:43 05/16/00

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On May 16, 2000 at 20:47:06, Mark Longridge wrote:

>I'm wondering what the current practical limit of tb's.
>
>Have we reached that limit now with 6 piece tbs?
>
>And why is one side often smaller than the other? Can we use just one
>side, and if so, why even bother with the other?
>
>And how about making "limited tb's" which only calculate from some positions,
>the positions most common in actual games. It seems to me you would get
>a lot of mileage out of these limited tbs, plus you could always add more
>starting positions later on.

Each new level takes a lot more space.  Eugene could probably give you a pretty
good estimate how big the full 6 piece set will be.  Some are particularly
uninteresting.  (e.g. KQQQQK does not hold a lot of drama).

How big they can get depends on how cheaply the data can be stored and how fast
it can be accessed.  If you have a thousand petabytes of data and can access it
in one millionth of a second, that would be great.  But if it takes ten hours to
find the answer, that's bad.  So the technology must be:
1.  Big enough
2.  Fast enough
3.  Cheap enough.

Generally, all three get better exponentially.  So the answer to your question
(in a nutshell) is "nobody knows."

On the other hand, we can say that only 6 piece files and smaller are really
practical now.  And you will need a lot of disk for the 6 piece files.




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