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Subject: Re: 7-man endgames (long)

Author: J. Wesley Cleveland

Date: 10:32:54 08/30/05

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On August 29, 2005 at 16:28:39, Eugene Nalimov wrote:

>On August 29, 2005 at 15:57:51, Joshua Shriver wrote:
>
>>Good Afternoon,
>>
>>      What is the WDL format? I've unsuccessfully been able to find information
>>on it. Is it a chess specific compression of general data?
>>
>>-Josh
>
>Store only Win/Draw/Lost value for every position, not the full value (Win in
>N/Draw/Lost in N).
>
>The simplest way to encode them would be to fit 5 values in a byte. 3**5 == 243,
>that is less than 256 different values, so you can store them into a byte. When
>probing you can easily get a value by using 243-element decode table (much
>faster than divisions).
>
>Other possibility would be to store 4 values into a byte -- 2 bits per position.
>Such table would be larger by itself, but it may compresses better -- when I
>experimented resulting compressed tables were smaller.
>
>Or you can store 2 tables -- one with Win/No Win, and other with Lost/No Lost.
>Presumable they will compress even better, and in lot of cases during the search
>you will probe only one of them, because that is all you need to know.
>
>Of course all those tables have drawback: you should assume that chess program
>that uses only them will be able to win a won position. E.g. it knows that OTB
>position is won. It know that out of all moves 3 moves also lead to won
>positions. Unfortunately it may not be able to figure out that current position
>is (say) mate in 30, move A leads to mate in 29, while moves B and C -- to mate
>in 35, and it may decide to make the wrong move. Hopefully such situation is
>rare enough, but I suspect it is more often when position is complex enough --
>i.e. exactly when you need TBs.
>
>Thanks,
>Eugene

Ideally, you would have both. Use WLD in the search and the full table at the
root. If disk space is a problem, just have the full tables for the difficult
cases.

>>>
>>>It's just computational problem, all you need is 1 array of 2 TB to
>>>generate it, and after that supercompress it to WDL format. DTZ is
>>>perhaps interesting to generate if your goal is to publish near to
>>>maximin positions, but from computerchess viewpoint what matters is the
>>>result in the game. That can be either one of the next 3: win, draw or loss.
>>>
>>>Supercompressed this EGTB in wdl is like 3GB.
>>>
>>>Additional i'm interested in knowing what from their database what the longest
>>>win is for the KRB side in the KRBNKRB egtb.
>>>
>>>Vincent



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