Author: Mike Hood
Date: 16:50:05 03/01/03
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On March 01, 2003 at 19:30:05, Brian Katz wrote: >On March 01, 2003 at 08:32:27, Mike Hood wrote: > >>The Nalimov endgame tablebases can be downloaded for free from Bob's ftp site, >>but I suppose it's nice to be able to buy them from Chessbase if you're without >>the Internet or have a slow connection. However, I don't see the point in >>offering a selection of the "most important" 5-piece tablebases. I think that >>the collection should be sold complete or not at all. After all, the most >>important endgame to me is usually the one that cropped up in my last club >>match, and Chessbase has no way of knowing that. >> >>Just my opinion..... > >I purchased the 9 Disk set of Nalimov Tablebases from this very site. >There are a few 5 piece endgames missing. The missing 5 piece endgames are >ridiculous endgames like KQRN vs K KQQQ vs K and some other endgames with King >and 3 pieces vs a King or KRPP vs K. Well, yes... most Kxxx vs K endgames are useless by themselves, since chess programs would have no trouble finding a win by calculation once these positions arise. However, I find tablebases like KQRN-K valuable to speed up the search during probing. If a search branch is found with only these five pieces on the board the engine can return the "Mate in N" value from the tablebase and then spend time examining other branches instead of wasting time going deeper into this branch.
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