Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 23:58:40 11/09/98
If you assume a pair of pawns which are arranged to form a ram, a 6-man table will be smaller than the corresponding 5-man table with one of the pawns missing, because the two pawns behave like one pawn, and there are 4 fewer squares to put pawns on (meaning that with one pawn you can take advantage of a2..d2..d7..a7 -> h2..e2..e7..h7 symmetry, but with two pawns in a ram you don't have to put any white ones on the 7th, because you can't have a black pawn on the 8th). So it ends up being like 5/6 the size of a normal 5-man table that includes a pawn, and something like 1/64 the size of a 6-man table including a pawn, and you don't need any 6-man sub-tables to create the thing. For example it should be very simple to generate databases such as KRP v KBP with the pawns rammed, on the order of a few days and under a gigabyte plus sub-table storage, which would just be KR vs KBP, KP vs KBP, KRP vs KB, and KRP vs KP, which is maybe another three gigabytes in puffy format (although these could probably use disk compression). I know that some of these ram cases have been done, but I'm not sure that the general cases have been done. I think there might have been something like white pawn on a6 and white bishop versus black pawn on a7 and rook, although I'm not sure exactly without looking it up. I don't think they let the ram float all over the board, I think they fixed it in one place, which would of course mean that this table would be like 1/24 the size of a normal 5-man table with a pawn. Have all of the theoretically important cases been done? And are any of them likely to have an effect in a real game? bruce
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