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Subject: Re: Thanks Bob

Author: Les Fernandez

Date: 10:28:47 01/15/03

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On January 15, 2003 at 12:49:45, Marc Bourzutschky wrote:

>On January 15, 2003 at 11:40:29, Les Fernandez wrote:
>
>>On January 15, 2003 at 11:33:16, Marc Bourzutschky wrote:
>>
>>>On January 15, 2003 at 09:48:25, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>><<snip>>
>>>>>If you are really desparate for those 5-1 endings (and like Eugene I don't see
>>>>>the point of generating them) you can use Johan de Koning's FEG program
>>>>>(available on www.chessmaster.com) to do it.  For 5-1 endings you'll need about
>>>>>300MB of RAM and a few gig disk space.  A typical pawnless ending will take
>>>>>about a day, an ending with pawns about 3 days, on a 2 Ghz machine.
>>>>>
>>>>>-Marc
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Does it produce DTM tables that will work with Eugene's probe code?
>>>>
>>>>Or is this the win/lose/draw stuff?
>>>
>>>It has full DTM information, but stored in a quite different format from
>>>Eugene's, and therefore not accessible by his probe code.  It should be possible
>>>to translate one format to the other, but such a utility does not yet exist.
>>
>>Hi Marc,
>>
>>Listen when you refer to a different format then Eugenes are you saying that in
>>it exists wtm draw,bwtm win, wtm mate, wtm broken, btm draw, btm win, btm mate,
>>btm broken info?  I am just trying to understand it because perhaps I can write
>>a converter to go to the format I need if the info is there.  Just a thought
>>
>>Les
>
>The format refers to the binary containing the actual data, and since the format
>is not public it would be almost impossible to write a converter yourself.
>
>During generation, the program also produces a stats file, similar to Eugene's
>.tbs file.  The stats file contains for each DTM the number of positions with
>that DTM, i.e., you get complete wtm win and btm lost info (for 5-1 there
>clearly are no wtm lost or btm win positions).  Broken positions and draws are
>not separated in the stats file, but it is easy enough to write a program to
>count broken positions, and then you can infer the number of draws by
>subtraction.


>
>One difference between the stats file and the .tbs file is the treatment of
>symmetry for pawnless endings, so you can't compare counts directly.  The .tbs
>file restricts the two kings to 462 squares, while in the stats file it
>restricts one of the kings to 10 squares, so you will consistently get more
>positions.  The compressed version of the chessmaster data actually applies full
>diagonal symmetery to the data, so you get even fewer positions than you get in
>the .tbs file, which only has a partial implementation of diagonal symmetry.
>But since the stats file is produced during generation rather than after
>compression it contains more positions.  It is actually possible to collect
>win-loss statistics on the compressed files as well (ply by ply), which will
>give you the stats with fully implemented symmetries.  For example, consider
>this wtm and mate in 2 position in KRK:

Thanks Marc for an excellent description.  It appears to boil down to comaparing
apples and oranges as far as I can see.  I certainly do not want to introduce
any variablitiy to what I am looking at! Appears to be enough variability in
both approaches to concern me.  Hmmm guess I will have to think further on this
one.

Les


>
>[D] 8/7R/8/8/8/2K5/8/k7 w
>
>the compressed chessmaster data would only count this position once, while in
>the .tbs file you would get a count of 2, because it also contains the position
>obtained by reflecting along the a1-h8 diagonal:
>
>[D] 6R1/8/8/8/8/2K5/8/k7 w
>
>-Marc
>
>>>
>>>The key benefit of Johan's program is the small footprint.  It only requires
>>>enough RAM to store the side to move, and as a result only needs about 15MB for
>>>6-man endings (excepting the pathological 5-1, which requires 300MB), regardless
>>>whether pawns are present or not.  The program is also significantly faster than
>>>the publically available version of Eugene's tbgen program (although it seems
>>>Eugene has a faster version now).  The complete 5-man set takes about 2 3/4 days
>>>to build on an AMD2600.



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