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

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 12:21:09 12/22/00

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On December 21, 2000 at 23:48:26, Eugene Nalimov wrote:

>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
>

I wanted to say 5 times.  But somehow I convinced myself that it was actually
3/256, since we normally store 256 unique states per entry, and only need
3 states for w/l/d.

Your number means we would need about 1.5 gigs of memory to hold all the
3-4-5 piece w/d/l files.  Not going to happen on my machines.  :)  Not worth
it.

The error I made was a simple one.  Probably due to the late hour and advanced
age.  :)

Thanks for watching carefully.  Need to keep me straight when I wander.  :)




>
>>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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