Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Endgame Books

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 16:42:28 05/29/03

Go up one level in this thread


How do you keep the endgame book from growing out of control? For instance, most
"book endgames" that I know of are not concrete positions. They are a type of
position, with certain features. An example is K+P vs K. There are almost two
hundred thousand configurations on the board for this one simple ending, but the
ending boils down to a handful of rules.

In rook endings there are certain positions that are "key positions", but if you
store every position that contains the key elements, you'd basically end up with
endgame tablebases, as far as I can tell. I think something different is
required. When I think of a "book", I think of a "collection of positions", and
it is not realistic to store all of the positions necessary for these "key
positions", because as you already mentioned, the current state of the art
doesn't allow that yet.

You don't really care so much about the particular position. You care about the
positioning of the pieces relative to one another. This kind of reminds me of
partition search, which is a kind of special transposition table. Maybe
something like that could be used for an endgame "book". Other than that, maybe
pre-processor knowledge, or just adding the knowledge to the evaluation
function.



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.