Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Half baked idea for an EGTB

Author: Ricardo Gibert

Date: 20:36:25 09/09/99

Go up one level in this thread


On September 09, 1999 at 22:57:34, Andrew Slough wrote:

>On September 09, 1999 at 21:57:28, Ricardo Gibert wrote:
>
>>Would it be feasible to generate an EGTB in the following manner: Instead of
>>storing DTM or DTC in the EGTB, how about storing "nth generated move progresses
>>towards mate"? It would seem this would be more compact in some endings. An old
>>idea? Yes? No? Maybe? Incorporating a little primitive AI to order the moves
>>generated would make the the tables even more compact.
>
>Information on the number of moves until a mate is needed during search probes
>(there may have been 10 reversible moves, so I would want to know if I could
>mate in 40) and during tablebase generation for algorithm termination. I'm not
>convinced it would be a more compressed representation either, but then again
>I'm not convinced Eugene's representation is optimal either...
>
>Move ordering is certainly the problem to make things compress well, but have
>you ever watch a computer play KBBKN? I'm not sure that primitive AI would give
>good results.
>
>Andy

I figured out the problem with it. It would only be useful fot the more trivial
EGs. With DTM for example, to generate the mate-in-4s, you only need the
mate-in-threes, etc. so while overall it might be more compact, using it and
generating it would be impractical.

I have another half baked idea: Instead of DTM, use Distance-To-Mate-Modulo-N.
So for example, in a KQKR ending with N=20 (or whatever it actually is), the
EGTB would return mate in 7 or 27. For sufficiently large N this would not
result in ambiguity, since a sub-optimal move would either throw away the win
completely or delay the win by at most N-1 moves. This would reduce the size of
the EGTB. The proper choice for N would need to be determined from DTM EGTB
tables. Generating the DTMMN table would require a trivial folding of DTM. I
would not be surprised if DTM already does this.



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.