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Subject: Re: Fritz's Tablebase Initialisation

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 05:12:44 05/05/04

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On May 05, 2004 at 07:47:57, Mike Hood wrote:

>I just let Filemon run while loading Fritz 8 to see why it takes so long. I was
>shocked to see that during the initialisation Fritz tries to open every possible
>tablebase. For instance...
>
>Open kpk.nbw.emd -- good, it's there
>Open kpknbw.emd -- file not found
>Open kpk_nbw.emd -- file not found
>Open kpk_nbw_emd -- file not found (I never knew this format was valid)
>Open kpk.nbw -- file not found
>
>And the same five accesses for the nbb file.
>
>Why carry on with the other three after finding the first tablebase? But it gets
>even wilder when it comes to the 6-piece tablebases. All 365 possible tablebase
>pairs in all possible formats are accessed, even though I don't have any on my
>disk. Thousands of "file not found" results. Just one example, to show how
>ludicrous it is:
>
>First Fritz tries to open krbnkp.nbw.emd, krbnkpnbw.emd, krbnkp_nbw.emd and
>krbnkp.nbw.emd. Almost the same as before, except Fritz is assuming 6-piece
>tablebases are compressed. But then Fritz tries to open krbnkp.0.nbw.emd,
>krbnkp.0_nbw.emd, krbnkp.0nbw.emd and krbnkp.0_nbw_emd. Then krbnkp.1.nbw.emd,
>etc... and krbnkp.2.nbw.emd... and all the way through to krbnkp.g.nbw.emd. That
>means 136 disk accesses for a tablebase that I don't have! And that's only one
>tablebase out of 365.
>
>Wouldn't it be much easier just to scan the tablebase directory and only open
>the files that actually exist?

Both nalimov and i do this in a similar way.

If you are willing to write code for this that works faster and works both for
windows and *nix, then i will be real happy to use it.

Best Regards,
Vincent



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