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Subject: Re: Endgame code instead of Tablebases

Author: Dave Gomboc

Date: 14:18:07 04/16/99

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On April 16, 1999 at 17:03:45, KarinsDad wrote:

>On April 16, 1999 at 15:28:42, Bruce Moreland wrote:
>
>>
>>It takes little effort and imagination to say that there might be patterns in
>>these endings that would allow them to be solved algorithmically with something
>>that is practical to write.
>>
>>It is not that people have not "gotten beyond their normal thought processes."
>>People have been considering this for at least 20 years.  ACC 2, written in
>>1980, may  as well have been titled, "Pissing Around With 4-man Endings", almost
>>half of the book is on this topic.
>>
>>Beal did it with KP vs K, via 3 pages of Fortran.  It is clearly the easiest one
>>to do, other than KQ vs K and KR vs K.
>>
>>So here is someone that conceived of this idea and executed it 20 years ago.
>
>Bruce,
>
>I was not trying to say that nobody has thought about this before (obviously
>that is not the case). However, I have seen no discussion on this in the 5
>months that I have been on this forum, so I threw it out to get people to think
>about it. And of course it is difficult. If it was easy, somebody would have
>done it by now. However, computer technology today is considerably stronger than
>it was 20 years ago, so maybe some math whiz here knows of some pattern
>recognition software that he can run against a tablebase that may enable him to
>crack this nut for some cases. Who knows? I do not dismiss things out of hand
>just because they are difficult. In fact, it is the difficult problems in life
>which are worth attempting to solve. Today, writing an expert level chess
>program is a piece of cake, it just takes time. 20 years ago, it would have been
>extremely difficult.
>
>KarinsDad :)
>
>>
>>Maybe it is possible to do it with more complicated endings, but I think that it
>>would be very difficult.  That is what would take significant effort and
>>imagination.  People tried it with KR vs KN but I think they all ran into walls.
>>
>>I've taken issue about this kind of thing in the past.  Some things, the idea is
>>everything and the implementation isn't that big a deal.  Other things, the idea
>>is not particularly difficult, but the implementation is a bitch.  Deriving
>>algorithms from endgame databases is in this latter category.
>>
>>bruce

So KarinsDad (or whatever your real name is :), are you suggesting that such a
rule base be built using the tablebase info, or are you suggesting it be
constructed without access to a tablebase?  If the former, what would be the
point?  We already have perfect information that fits on hardware worth a couple
of hundred bucks.  If the latter, how?

Dave



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