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Subject: Re: To Martin Fierz: LZSS compression and EGTB

Author: martin fierz

Date: 15:48:20 05/10/02

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On May 10, 2002 at 17:25:49, Alvaro Jose Povoa Cardoso wrote:

>Hi Martin,
>I would like to know your opinion on LZSS for EGTB.
>LZSS is extremely fast on decompression.
>I tested a 104Mb pgn file with LZSS and it compressed to 35Mb.
>I know pgn files is not the intended purpose but do you think it has good
>aplicability for EGTB?
>
>Best regards,
>Alvaro Cardoso

hi alvaro,

i don't even know what LZSS is :-)
i'm currently very busy working on my program for the las vegas tournament, so
i'm not trying for better database compression at the moment. i have compressed
my database from about 37GB to 4.3GB; but it is a lossy compression scheme,
removing all positions where a capture can occurr from the database. this makes
a lot of sense because these are typically positions with "random" values. the
chinook db is compressed to 5.6GB, both mine and the chinook db use run-length
encoding.
at the time chinook was programmed (about 1992-1996), schaeffer wrote that RLE
was the only viable method for db compression - as it was fast in decompression.
since then, processor speed has increased much more than harddisk speed, so
maybe today a scheme with longer decompression time but better compression would
do much better.
once i need disk IO in my program, it just dies - it typically does 1000kN/s in
an opening position, and that goes down to 500kN/s in an endgame position, where
it has all the db blocks in memory. if it has to read from disk, it can get as
slow as 5kN/s!
winzip compresses my compressed database down to about 2.5GB. so that's about as
good as it can be. i definitely plan to look into other compression methods
after the vegas tournament is through. for example, the compression for chess
EGTB with datacomp.exe is about 30-40% better than mine - already quite close to
the winzip values. i don't know what it uses

aloha
  martin



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