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Subject: Re: Endgame Books

Author: Matthew White

Date: 15:45:39 05/29/03

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On May 29, 2003 at 18:35:12, Ryan B. wrote:

>Both HD space and probing time are restricting factors in what I think you are
>asking for.  For the time you waist probing your end game book in mid game your
>opponent is productively searching moves.  For now I believe the best way to
>handle end games is to have a different eval functions for different stages of
>the game and pry for a smooth transition from late mid game to end game.
>
>-Ryan
Here's the thing, though: if book positions are already loaded into a hash
table, then there is no disk access. Hard disk space doesn't really seem
problematic in this case either: after all, endgame tablebases take up huge
amounts of space, and yet we continue to use them even though they are only
helpful in a very small number of cases.

Prayer doesn't seem like a very good answer, and though I agree that there
should be a different eval function for endgame and middlegame, the eval is
sometimes nearly impossible to get right in endgame situations: material is
sometimes totally unimportant, and the difference between moving the king one
square or another can mean the difference between a win and a loss 30 moves
later.

Matt



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