Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 07:09:30 11/13/01
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On November 13, 2001 at 08:31:09, William Penn wrote: >I suspect this has been discussed before but I didn't pay attention, so please >pardon my redundancy. If you could just point me in the right direction, much >appreciated... > >Can't we make some assumptions without compromising very much practical playing >strength and significantly reduce the size of the endgame tablebases? For >example it seems a waste to generate separate positions for "white to move" and >"black to move". How would you handle all the common zugzwang positions? black king at e6, white king at e4, white pawn at e3. White to move draws. Black to move loses. > Surely there is a reasonable simplification in that regard >based on symmetry. Promotion of a pawn to less than a Queen is rare and could be >disregarded. There are plenty of positions where underpromotion is the only way to avoid a stalemate. That would convert many wins into draws. > Perhaps castling can be disregarded because it seldom happens in >the endgame. castling is already ignored and not part of the tables. > I suppose we must keep en passant(?). I'm guessing that the size >could be reduced to perhaps only 1GB for all of the 3-4-5 piece positions vs the >current 7GB. That would also make it more practical to generate 6-piece >positions. Anybody know how? >WP eliminating 1/2 the tables cuts it to 3.75 gigs. None of the other changes you suggest are doable. And eliminating either wtm or btm will cause problems as I mentioned. 7.5 gigs is a trivial amount of disk space today, with new machines usually coming with at least a 60 gig drive.
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