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Subject: Re: Effect of tablebases on programs' performance

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:12:32 05/27/01

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On May 27, 2001 at 21:42:39, James Swafford wrote:

>On May 27, 2001 at 20:26:47, Bruce Moreland wrote:
>
>>
>>Sometimes the increase is zero.  For instance, in my CCT3 games over the past
>>two days, none of them were affected by endgame databases.
>
>I used them in Tristram 5.0, which came out of retirement for CCT3.
>Tablebases became a factor twice.  The first time was while playing
>Arasan.  Towards the endgame (with seven pieces on the board),
>Tristram started probing wildly.  It probed the disks so much my
>nps went from 300k or so to < 30k.  I think it *costs* me half a
>point.  I can't be sure... but I went from a won position to a
>drawn one.

The moral of that story is to be a bit more careful about how frequently
you probe.  I spent a _lot_ of time until I reached something that seems to
work well.




>
>The second case they saved my a**.  This was while playing Amateur.
>You yourself commented that Amateur would win that game.  Will was
>up on material and it really looked like he would win, but eventually
>tablebases turned up a draw for me.  Very lucky.
>
>So I guess the net effect was almost nothing.
>
>[snip]
>
>>
>>I think it is interesting that so many people use the Nalimov stuff without any
>>concern that at some point while the program is playing, it is not their program
>>actually playing.  That idea bothered me enough that I wrote my own stuff.
>
>It does actually, which is why I may not use them in the program I'm
>working on now.  I don't know yet.
>
>
>--
>James


It doesn't bother me for lots of reasons:  (1) many programs running today
have bits and pieces of my code in them;  (2) most of the algorithsm I use
today are from ideas produced by others, years ago.

I don't think that just because you have something to "probe" for you, or
you have a library function that does something _else_ for you, that you
should be concerned about originality.  IE how is it different to use EGTBs
than to use a compiler somebody else wrote to compile your program?

That point is totally lost on me.  IE I use xboard for my GUI.  I didn't
write that.  I use a mega-million game PGN collection.  I didn't develop
those.  I use the same Zobrist hashing everybody else does.  I didn't develop
that.  The list goes on and on and on...



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