Author: Jon Dart
Date: 20:20:20 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. That's possible. I haven't analyzed that game yet. But at least you were getting some benefit from the TBs (and remember, a TB hit is giving you exact knowledge that can substitute for a *lot* of search). Arasan had only 4-man TBs and wasn't helped at all by them at the crucial parts of the game. >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 I don't think I'm bothered by that. As noted, TB use is pretty universal. I got tired of playing other programs that have TBs when I don't. Theoretical endgame knowledge is sometimes useful but a lot of times it's unhelpful or even hurts you. The TBs keep you from being blind at these times. And I don't feel the need to write my own TB decompression code, no more than I feel the need to rewrite gzip or winzip. Releasing a program with TB support is a different issue. As discussed at one point during the tournament, it raises some licensing issues, especially with those programs that are under GPL. If I were really adamant about being under GPL I could see that as a reason to reimplement the TB support code. As it is I'm not using GPL, but even so, I may keep the TB support in the source but not distribute with TB support compiled in. --Jon
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