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Subject: Re: Questions about Nimzo8 and its proprietary endgame tablebases.

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 18:53:57 12/21/00

Go up one level in this thread


On December 21, 2000 at 13:33:35, Peter Kasinski wrote:

>On December 21, 2000 at 10:18:26, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On December 21, 2000 at 09:45:23, Peter Kasinski wrote:
>>
>>>These are meant to be permanently stored in RAM, and thus the significant RAM
>>>requirement. At the same time Nimzo8 still uses Nalimov tablebases and assigns
>>>RAM for that.
>>>
>>>1. Isn't there an overhead of trying to use both?
>>>2. What is a reasonable strategy for allowing Nizmo8 to use one vs. the other?
>>>I.e. should a nominal amount of RAM be assigned for caching Nalimov tablebases
>>>and the rest (as much as possible) to Nimzo's own?
>>>3. Finally, does it make sense to increase these allocations at the expense of
>>>the main hash table size?
>>>
>>>If someone has info/interesting experiences with the above, please do share
>>>:)Thanks!
>>>
>>>PK
>>>
>>>ps. Merry Christmas to all (who celebrate)!
>>
>>
>>The Nimzo tablebases are win/lose/draw, which makes them much smaller than the
>>normal distance-to-mate tablebases.  They are used only in the search as they
>>can't tell which move leads to the shortest mate.  Once the root position is
>>5 pieces, normal tablebases have to be used to avoid repetitions, which is why
>>both are needed.
>
>Thanks, I was wondering about their size too.
>But what do you think Bob of the trade-off between using RAM for the main hash
>tables and tablebase caching?
>
>PK


I don't do that, so I can't really say.  The issue is that the full set of 3-4-5
piece files take 7.5 gigabytes.  The win/lose/draw files should take 3/256 of
that amount, or roughly 88 megabytes.  That is a lot of memory to dedicate to
the endings, but it might be worth it as there would be _no_ disk accesses
inside the search.  I am afraid that 88 might be a bit low, as the win/lose/draw
tables might not compress as well as the full 8-bit tables.  I would guess that
200 megabytes might be a reasonable guestimate...

As far as EGTBs vs RAM, yes you get hurt in the middlegame, and make it up in
the endgame.  You might even try demand=loading the files you need as you
encounter each endgame class for the first time, so that this isn't a
big problem...



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