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Subject: Re: Neverending story with incomplete tablebases

Author: Peter Berger

Date: 05:45:35 08/10/03

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On August 09, 2003 at 19:11:16, Harald Faber wrote:

>On August 09, 2003 at 05:55:43, Tony Hedlund wrote:
>
>>How can J8 allow game 14 to end as a draw?
>
>
>This is no serious question, isn't it?
>It has been posted and mentioned approx. 1,000,000 times. It is the problem of
>incomplete tablebases. AFAIK you/SSDF uses the "Fritz Endgame Turbo". Based on
>the Chessbase marketing it consists of 4 CD-roms with "the most important
>endgame tablebases". Based on what you saw in this game, what many many others -
>include me - have seen in similar positions, it is crap.

I don't want to join the war :), just want to add a similar problem that could
be an issue with Chess Tiger, even when using a complete set.

Chess Tiger has a unique way of announcing mates by not counting the mating move
in mate announcements. At least when using the Fritz aka ChessBase interface a
move taking material and entering a 5 piece ending won't look attractive as
doing it one move later can look more attractive for the engine.

An example:
[D]8/5k2/3K4/6p1/4R3/2q2P2/8/8 b - - 0 1

Here Tiger prefers Qa3+ or Qd3+ over Qxf3, because it believes Qxf3 is a
miserable mate in 16 when Qa3 or Qd3 are mate in 15, counting the Tiger way. I
couldn't check with Chess Tiger 15 for CB as I don't own it. I am not sure if
this could lead to a similar problem as with missing tablebases, but it is
possible.

It is a well-known problem that users often won't use complete sets of
tablebases and one easy to work around. I don't understand why this is not done
for the commercial engines.

Peter



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