Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Dangerously stupid tablebase idea...

Author: Angrim

Date: 13:59:07 10/21/01

Go up one level in this thread


On October 19, 2001 at 18:16:27, Dann Corbit wrote:

<snip>
>I don't know why you need to know the distance to mate (which is given as the
>reason not to store the move).  If you make the best possible move, then it does
>not matter what the distance is.  If it is too far away, then you can only draw
>anyway.  Whatever the case, you need to make the best possible move and if that
>has been encoded, it seems like it should be enough.

If you only use N piece tablebases once you are down to N pieces on
the board, then your idea would work.  However you also need to be
able to probe them when you reach an N piece position in the search,
and want to find out if this position is won or lost.  For this purpose
all you need is win/draw/loss, and some people do use tablebases that
only store this information since they take less space.  But to find
the shortest win when searching a position with more than N pieces,
you need to have distance to mate stored in the table.

>
>But I imagine there are horrible holes in this idea also, that I am simply
>unaware of.

Well, posting here is a good way to stress-test your ideas a little.

Angrim



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.