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Subject: Re: question to Prof Hyatt on environmental care.

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 15:16:22 01/25/05

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On January 25, 2005 at 18:04:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 25, 2005 at 16:32:58, Duncan Roberts wrote:
>
>>On January 25, 2005 at 16:25:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On January 25, 2005 at 16:13:01, Duncan Roberts wrote:
>>>
>>>>My understanding of dann corbit is that a 32 piece tablebase needs a 2.5 * 2.5
>>>>cube of crystal.
>>>>
>>>>http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?407489
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>This is considerably less than a galaxy and perhaps could be slipped pass
>>>>greenpeace, although I think you were referring to all games.
>>>>
>>>>anyway is this calculation anywhere near right ?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>duncan
>>>
>>>
>>>I honestly have no idea.  First, I really don't know how big the actual game
>>>tree for chess will be.  It could be _very_ big if the game goes on and on with
>>>every 50th move being a pawn push or capture to restart the 50 move rule.  Or it
>>>might be that it is a forced win or draw or loss inside 50 move, with best play.
>>> Until we know how big the tree really is, it is hard to predict how much
>>>storage will be required to hold it.  For the worst case, where some 5500 moves
>>>are possible before it becomes a forced draw (forced in that I assume one side
>>>will claim the draw if the other side will not, otherwise the game becomes
>>>infinite and all bets are off) that is so big that it is impossible to estimate
>>>anything about it.  There are positions with a branching factor of one (one
>>>legal move) as well as positions with a branching factor of over 200.  When
>>>talking about W^D where D is big and W can get big, I personally lose focus. :)
>>
>>
>>but to store a 32 piece tablebase would be a lot 'smaller'.
>>
>>might  a 2.5 by 2.5 kilometre crystal  do the trick ?
>>
>>
>>duncan
>
>The size of that is easy to compute.  you start off with one piece on any of 64
>squares.  That takes 6 bits.  Another piece on any of the remaining 63 squares.
>This turns into 64*63*62*61...*33...  which is about 2e55 if I did my math
>right.  Or another way is 6 bits * 32 pieces = 192 bits = 2^192 = 6e57.
>
>Both are big numbers.  If you can store that many _values_ in a crystal of that
>size, then you are set.  note that win/lose/draw is not good enough here, you
>need a mate in N value, not just win/lose/draw or you can't play the game and
>win when you should.

There are things that can reduce the piece on board placements, like king
placement, etc.  Uri Blass wrote a program that calculated 3.70106e+046 distinct
board postions (so you would need 155 bits to encode a chess position.)

But you can also reduce that value by 4 via reflection and color reversal giving
153 bits.

If we did a proof search, maybe we only need 2 bits per position, and we use the
actual positions as a 153 bit number index (so we never store the positions
anywhere -- the only value of the position is to give us the address of the
answer in the crystal).

At any rate, I calculate the crystal as 100,000 KM on an edge.
That's a lot of crystal.
What's that -- about the volume of Jupiter?



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