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Subject: Re: Memory Consumption of 4-men w/d/l Endgame Tables

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 07:03:39 11/13/01

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Thanks a lot Paul.

Did Ernst A. Heinz comment on some unusual cases? For example this nice position
from Tarrasch, "Das Schachspiel":

[D] 4N3/8/6p1/8/8/7p/5K1k/8 b - -

1...Kh1 2. Nf6 Kh2 3. Ng4+ Kh1 4. Kf1 g5 5. Kf2 h2 6. Ne3 g4 7. Nf1 g3+ 8. Nxg3#
(White to move, also wins)

The mate position is KNKP, where in your list this is not considered. No, doubt,
this will not play a role in practical games. However it leaves a (very small)
ungood feeling, when you know, that you make your program purposley blind for
some special study like positions. I think, this would be no problem for an eval
function, to give N vs. P(s) allways a positive score for the P (which I am
actually doing). This will heal itself by the search. However, when you cut in
the search too early, it will be blind for this forever.

BTW. If you ever should be the black side of this position on an internet chess
server. Just don't move. After some time, you will see the message: "game drawn,
Black runs out of time, and White has not enough mating material", or similar
:-)

Did Heinz also mention, how he handles the stalemate problem for the "allways
won" cases?

And at last, I have found a very small improvement. For w/d/l cases, it seems to
be assumed, that 4 positions are encoded in one byte, while it is possible, to
store 5 positions in the same space.

Regards,
Dieter



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