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

Author: Eugene Nalimov

Date: 20:48:26 12/21/00

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On December 21, 2000 at 21:53:57, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>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...

Sorry, Bob, you are wrong. You can pack ~5 W/D/L values in one byte (3**5==243,
that is roughly equal to 256) instead of one full value, so your W/D/L tables
would be ~5 times smaller than the full ones, not ~80 times smaller.

Eugene


>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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