Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Little warning for endgame tablebases

Author: Eugene Nalimov

Date: 09:15:52 01/13/05

Go up one level in this thread


On January 13, 2005 at 11:08:48, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 13, 2005 at 05:36:41, Tony Werten wrote:
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>
>>when checking my own tables, I found out that the following (illegal ) position,
>>causes the Nalimov code( rather, the decompresssion code ) disabled further egtb
>>probes.
>>
>>No problem for normal use, just when you're doing something without checking if
>>the position is legal, it goes wrong.
>>
>>The position looks like it might have been optimized away, causing a probe
>>beyond the uncompressed size of the filechunck just read in, causing an
>>"invalid" flag on the tablebase, resulting in a disabling of the KNNkp
>>tablebase.
>>
>>[D]4K3/8/8/k7/8/1N6/p7/N7 w - - 0 0
>>
>>Tony
>
>
>I believe this has always been a restriction.  Since one way to compress the
>database (before the raw compression algorithm) is to weed out positions that
>are not possible, such as two kings on adjancent squares, both kings in check,
>pawns on illegal squares, etc.  I suppose the probe code could be modified to do
>all the legality checks, but then it would have to be able to generate moves to
>see if a king is in check and the other side is on move, etc.  It makes more
>sense for the chess engine to do that stuff since it knows about legality issues
>anyway...
>
>Perhaps Eugene will comment further...

If you pass illegal position you'll get back either "unknown value" (if you are
lucky), or value for some other position.

I definitely would not turn off further probing, but chess engine can.

Thanks,
Eugene



This page took 0 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.