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Subject: Re: Why not tablebases.

Author: blass uri

Date: 02:06:20 10/10/98

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On October 10, 1998 at 03:06:47, David Eppstein wrote:

>On October 10, 1998 at 00:56:05, blass uri wrote:
>>You need memory to store the best move for example in KBBKN for the stronger
>>side the maximal number of legal moves is 8+13+13=34 legal moves
>>and you need 6 bits for a move so I think you do not save memory by this.
>>If you have a good order of moves and always 1 of the first 32 moves is best you
>>can need only 5 bits
>>
>>If you store distance to conversion with my idea you need only 5 bits
>>for 1-2,3-4,...49-50,draw,loss
>>You need to do a search but I do not think there is a problem with small search.
>
>If you do compression and on-the-fly decompression of blocks of your tablebase
>(the way to go I think for getting the total size down; compress blocks rather
>than whole file at once so you can quickly decompress only the pages you use)
>then what you should be striving for in setting up the uncompressed form of your
>tablebase is not the fewest bits but most compressible patterns.  Compression is
>based on prediction: something is compressible exactly when it is predictable.
>
>So, for instance, win-loss-draw information in a tablebase like KQKR is very
>easy to compress (easy to predict: it's mostly just wins) but distance-to-mate
>is harder (the messiness of these numbers is related to the difficulty of
>playing the endgame without a tablebase). Your proposal saves a small percentage
>of total bits in the uncompressed file while making the distance numbers even
>messier.
>
>My guess is that Roberto's suggestion of storing a database of best moves,
>rather than of distances, is a big win in this respect.  We already have a
>pretty good idea how to predict best moves (just do a shallow search based on
>any reasonable evaluation) so they should compress well.

I agree.

If we have a good evaluation function then we can compress the best move by not
more than 3 bits(if I suppose that 1 of the 8 best moves by evaluation is realy
the best move).
so even if the result is not predictable it may be a good idea to compress by
storing the best move and the result
and not storing the number of moves to mate divided by 2.

Uri



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