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Subject: Imagine the game of chess as a very large, dark and beautiful forrest...

Author: Ingo Lindam

Date: 04:11:39 11/03/02

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Well, let's imagine the game of chess as a very very large, dark and beautiful
forrest... Going somewhere into this forrest and choosing a direction means
knowing not where (and whether) to come out of the forrest again.

Meanwhile there are a lot of ways, streets and highways through parts of the
forrest and ofcourse it might be possible that one day in the very very future
there will be so many well known streets and highways through the forrest that
we may say... leaving the street into one of the remaining dark parts of the
forrest means never coming back or leaving ít on loosing street. And there might
be a plan of deciding the direction at the crossings of the well known streets
to come out on winning avenue. That ofcourse would be a great success for the
pathfinders, road constructers, tree cutters, alpha-beta-pruners, etc. ...but
ofcourse also very pity thinking of the beautiful large forrest as is was in the
beginning of the way-through-researches.

Nevertheless, for us human beings ofcourse such a web of streets and highways
will ever be as dark and dangerous as the original forrest.

Ingo



On November 03, 2002 at 06:37:50, Omid David wrote:

>On November 03, 2002 at 06:00:14, GuyHaworth wrote:
>
>>
>>Would you say the same about a game of Nim with three piles of N matches - N
>>being suitably large.
>>
>>You might ... but the answer is 'no':  Nim is solved already.
>>
>>
>>Why assume that it is necessary to search every position?
>>I'm quite handy at KQK, KQQK, etc without needing to search.
>>
>
>What about KBNK? You know that it is a victory, and will most probably win the
>game without any problem. But may programs cannot do so without the use of
>tablebases (the same "database of positions" I mentioned). Now, how big can this
>database eventually grow? Simple math shows that it can never pass a certain
>limit. (e.g. 7 men tablebases seem out of the question at the moment, let alone
>a 32 men tablebase!)
>
>
>>g




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