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

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 10:31:53 05/20/99

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On May 19, 1999 at 20:55:40, Eugene Nalimov wrote:

>I'm participating in that thread because I'm curious: how much we can "squeeze"
>the average position. Unfortunately, I don't see who will implement suggested
>algorithms and where it'll be used.
>
>To speak more generally, I can see 3 different goals for such the algorithm that
>results in 3 different representation requirements:
>(1) To store the entire game in the least possible # of bits. Here, as it was
>pointed earlier, you'd better store starting position (if necessary) and
>sequence of moves.
>(2) To store the random position in the *fixed* number of bits, so that the
>resulting file (database?) can be directly indexed. That means you have to
>optimize the worst case. And here majority of the clever tricks (e.g. using less
>bits for pawns or pieces on the 1st/8th ranks) will not work. IMHO, that
>representation must be able to cover even the pathological cases that cannot
>happen in the real games.
>(3) To store the *average* position in the minimum amount of bits. That
>representation can work if you plan to use only sequental search through those
>positions. And here is the place of KarinsDad's schema - *average* position will
>be stored significally better than by using the algorithm from the case (2).
I think I should make clear why I brought it up in the first place. For *my*
purposes, I do not necessarily need the very smallest conceivable.  I just want
something very small and very fast and easy to understand.  It will be used to
take a few hundred thousand EPD records and create an in-memory table for
lookups.  Hence, it has to work in the general case.  I looked over some common
schemes and just wanted to make sure that I was not overlooking something
important that could save a lot of space.  To store games, you could use a
scheme like pigbase which only needs one byte per position.  But I don't want
that.  I need to be able to access a random position that may not even be
connected to other positions.



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