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Subject: Re: Is this where the 174 bit minimal figure comes from?

Author: Heiner Marxen

Date: 12:49:59 05/19/99

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On May 19, 1999 at 15:15:31, KarinsDad wrote:

>On May 19, 1999 at 11:32:51, Heiner Marxen wrote:
>
>>On May 18, 1999 at 08:02:09, Peter Klausler wrote:
>>
>>>On May 17, 1999 at 21:15:59, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>>
>>>>You would also need to store e.p. square, if any, I think. Ten bits more
>>>>[5ep+4castle+1stm]gives 174 bits.
>>>
>>>Two bits are all you need for the en passant file, actually.
>>>There can be at most four pawns of the opponent on his
>>>fourth rank next to a pawn of the player (on his fifth).
>>
>>Wrong.  There can be 5 such pawns.  E.g. 8/8/8/8/PpPPpPPp/8/8/8 b -
>>Even when we know already that there is an e.p. possible, we still
>>have to distinguish up to at least 5 cases.
>
>No, you only need 1 ep bit (based on the structure that this original statement
>was made).

Sure. Ok.  I did not question the counting of bits, but wanted to correct
Peter's "There can be at most four pawns...".

>Because, if ep exists, then you can add 4 more bits to the structure
>to represent the square involved (3 bits) and the direction of capture (1 bit,
>a file to b file, or b file to a file type of thing) and you can remove 6 bits
>from the original structure for the pawn that can be taken by ep and the pawn
>that can take (if you have 2 pawns that can take, you do not care since the
>other one still shows up in the original structure). Hence, an en-passant case
>takes up 2 bits less (+4 -6) than a non-en-passant case.
>
>So, only 1 ep bit is needed.

That is correct IMHO.  And I like these tricky encodings :-)

>KarinsDad :)



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