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Subject: Re: 7-man endgames (long)

Author: Marc Bourzutschky

Date: 16:34:09 08/30/05

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On August 30, 2005 at 18:44:05, Dieter Buerssner wrote:

>On August 29, 2005 at 14:01:31, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On August 29, 2005 at 10:45:38, Duncan Roberts wrote:
>>
>>>On August 29, 2005 at 03:29:12, Marc Bourzutschky wrote:
>>>
>>>>During the past 6 months Yakov Konoval and I have collaborated on efficient
>>>>algorithms to exactly solve 7-man endgames.  Yakov has come up with a program
>>>>that contains every trick in the book, and then some.  Many of the ideas are
>>>>refinements of those used by Johan de Koning in his path breaking FEG program.
>>>>
>>>>Our hardware is extremely basic, about US $3,000 worth of equipment: a single
>>>>3.6 GHZ PIV, with 4 GB RAM, two 250 GB IDE hard disks, running Windows XP.
>>>>
>>>>To put Yakov's programming skills in perspective, his program solves the
>>>>infamous 6-man krnknn endgame in just over one hour on that hardware.
>>>
>>>Great achievement. well done.
>>>
>>>
>>>how long would a dtm program have taken to solve the  6-man krnknn endgame on
>>>your machine. ?
>>
>>DTM requires much more than just a little bit overhead.
>>
>>Additional i feel there is no need for DTM.
>>
>>From the huge size that Marc shows for their DTZ egtb's, compressed still
>>a formidable 160GB for just a single EGTB, it is obvious IMHO that
>>win/draw/loss is just so so superior.
>>
>>of course in case of marc's egtbs there is only a 'win/no win' distinction
>>possible. They don't have a 'loss' component.
>>
>>That would reduce their EGTBs in win/no win format dramatical further!
>>
>>Yet at generation time, creating WDL is nearly the same effort like DTZ.
>>DTM is really a lot effort more, and if you ask me, just a bit overdone for
>>the big EGTBs.
>
>With a slight variation of the DTZ algorithm, you will be able to construct TBs
>that respect the 50 moves rule. This is obviously not possible, when you only
>use WDL. Marc did not tell details about the algorithm they used, yet. I guess
>RAM requirements at creation time would be the same. But perhaps RAM
>requirements is a non issue with the method used by them.
>
>Regards,
>Dieter

Yes, 50-move rule is easy with a program that DTZ.  However, at the moment I'm
hoping we might break that pesky 243 move krnknn record, so I don't want to
restrict the depth.  So far we have come close with 226 moves.  At the moment we
are actually limited to 254 moves because we use 1 byte per position, but I'm
sure we'll find a way around that when we need to!

RAM for a general pawnless 7-man ending is a little under 3 GB.  So far we have
only needed 1.5 GB, because we split krbnkrb into even and odd components on the
bishop's color.  But it seems that we a special boot option we can use 3 GB even
on a 32 bit operating system, so it should not be a big issue.

-Marc



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