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Subject: Re: Why not tablebases.

Author: John Coffey

Date: 12:44:25 10/09/98

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On October 09, 1998 at 14:56:46, José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba wrote:

>
>To make a tablebase, you need all of its descendants first. The direct sons of
>KPPKP are:
>KPKP (black captures one white pawn)
>KPPK (white captures the black pawn)
>KQPKP (white promotes to a queen)
>KRPKP (white promotes to a rook)
>KBPKP (white promotes to a bishop)
>KNPKP (white promotes to a knight)
>KPPKQ (black promotes to a queen)
>KPPKR (black promotes to a rook)
>KPPKB (black promotes to a bishop)
>KPPKN (black promotes to a knight)
>	And each one of these has its own sons, which must be calculated first, until
>you reach KK, KBK or KNK (which are drawn). So, your storage requirements might
>be a little higher.
>	With so many pawns, a tablebase with little information (like the one you want
>to make), could be  useful, as you can search only the branches which do not
>decrease the exact score for the side to move.


Realistically if I am going to make a KPP vs KP database (and subsets with
smaller numbers of pawns), then I only need to know if a position is a win,
draw, or loss or unknown.  If I start with positions where pawns are close to
queening then I should be able to determine that from calculation.  Other
positions will be able to force into the positions that I already calculated, so
I can build the database from there.  In this case I would have to consider a
win as having a material advantage of at least a rook.

Sure I would like to have all the other databases, but I am trying to get
something practical here that doesn't take up too much space.

It would be nice to know the number of moves until mate, but with KPP vs KP
I don't feel it is necessary.  Instead the database will allow two things:

1.  Cutoffs in the middle of the tree when reaching a position in the database.
This is assuming that we don't start from a known position.

2.  If I already start with a known position then I can get a list of
candidate moves that still win or draw.  I wont examine other moves and
I won't be looking at the tablebase in the search.  Instead I will try to
determine which of the candidate moves wins the most quickly.

I could get more information with more space, but we are talking a gig
database here.

John Coffey




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