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Subject: Re: If you gave a program unlimited time, could it solve a 5 piece ending?

Author: Jesper Antonsson

Date: 08:43:49 06/02/02

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On June 02, 2002 at 10:50:52, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On June 02, 2002 at 04:47:21, Terry Ripple wrote:
>
>>Could Fritz,Century,Tiger,Junior,or Crafty solve any or all the 5 piece endgame
>>problems if given no time limit and not able to use Nalimov's tablebases?
>>
>>If the answer is no, then why not if the program could take any amount of time
>>that it needed to find the correct answer to the solution?
>>
>>Thanks in advance for any information!
>>
>>Best Regards,
>>Terry
>
>
>Solve = See the mate, or Solve = play moves good enough to win?
>
>In many endings, the computer can do fine.  But not all.  IE KNN vs KP
>is very difficult.  Particularly if you want to actually find the mate
>which can be well beyond 200 plies...

That's true, but I percieved the question as more theoretical than practical, so
it should be the case that using unlimited time, any correct program with no ply
limit or stack limit that prohibits 230 or whatever recursive calls to search(),
should be able to solve any five man ending. It may take billions of years,
though, on reasonable hardware.

However, experiment with the though that we have a terabyte of RAM or something
like that (some high end database servers do, I've heard). Then it should be
possible to solve any five man tablebase through ordinary search, since the
program will in essence construct the relevant subset of the tablebases, albeit
distributed in it's hash tables. It shouldn't have to be more than an order of
magnitude or two slower than ordinary tablebase construction. With specific
coding, it might even be faster than tablebase construction since we only need
to walk through a small subset of the positions in the relevant EGTBs.



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