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Subject: Re: Interesting endgame database probe problem

Author: José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba

Date: 08:18:50 02/08/99

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On February 07, 1999 at 18:30:17, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On February 07, 1999 at 13:12:01, José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba wrote:
>
>>
>>Was crafty using the full 3+2 five men tablebases?
>
>yes...
>
>
>>If the position after 100...Kc4 is a mate in 70 moves, then the position after
>>101.Qe2+ should allow black a move which is a mate in at most 69 moves. But this
>>position appeared *twice* before in the game. I wonder why crafty did not go for
>>the mate in 69 *before*.
>
>
>the problem is that at the point where it screwed up, it had a _real_ mate
>in 73, or a bogus mate in 70 (bogus because it was a draw before the mate
>could be played).  So it went for the mate in 70 because the bug didn't let
>it detect that the next opponent move would be a 3-fold repetition.
>

	I see that crafty would never give up the h-pawn to reach a drawn QP vs Q
ending. So I assume that the position after 96. Qxh5+ is won for black.
	I do not understand why, in a tablebase position, crafty allowed the same
position to appear twice (however, I understand why it allowed the third
repetition now). If crafty is in a won tablebase position, the distance to mate
should decrease every move.

>
>
>>
>>	Is it possible to have a queue of tablebase positions which need to be scored
>>waiting for the harddisk to respond?
>
>not really.  Because when I do a probe, I _know_ I will get a result.  So
>the search will definitely terminate here, with win/lose/draw scores.  But I
>can't really go on until I know which...  because of alpha/beta....
>

I see, the score is needed for the cutoffs. I realized that after giving it some
thought at home.

>
>
>>Currently there are no faster drives available, but there will...
>
>Certainly, although I doubt we are going to see much below 5ms for the
>access time.  There is still 'inertia' to overcome.  But it wouldn't matter
>if it was down to 1ms...  because compare a 1ms disk read to a 2ns instruction
>cycle time in a 500mhz processor...  a difference of _one million_ that will
>only get worse, not better...



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