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Subject: Re: EGTB generation

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:26:11 09/17/99

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On September 17, 1999 at 10:54:09, Owen Lyne wrote:

>Continuing to set iup my new Athlon with Crafty, tablebases, Winboard etc. So,
>I'm at the EGTB stage right now. Thought people might be interested in
>speed of generation - did all the 3/4 piece tablebases in about
>90 minutes (Eugene quotes a PII/400 taking about 2 hours, so that
>sounds about right).
>
>Next though is 5 piece, I have 256MB of RAM but Eugene likes
>machines with 500+, so I may have a problem...
>
>Which bases (perhaps pwnless ones?) can I do and which are totally
>impossible with the code set up as it is? Can I try anything and
>just put up wirh ridiculous paging to disk and slow performance,
>or is it not even possible?
>
>Other thought is about compression - being able to run Crafty
>using compressed tablebases is absolutely awesome, and without taking
>a performance hit is astonishing! Great work Bob, Eugene and Andrew Kadatch!
>


Take my name out of the equation...  that was Eugene and friends totally...
And yes, you are right, excellent code (although I hate reading some of the
C++ stuff they write, just like I assume they hate reading some of my code.  :)
)

But it does work well, and amazingly fast...  and to think that we can have all
the interesting 5 piece files (just omitting 4 vs 1) in under 6 gigs is really
something...



>Now - how about generating tablebases, is it possible (either with current code,
>or to modify code so it is) to generate tablebases where the minors
>are compressed? That would be incredibly useful, especially again if it
>was without much performance hit.

I don't understand?  _all_ the databases are compressed, but even in the
uncompressed format, they are 'compressed' because of the new indexing
scheme Eugene uses that takes advantage of symmetry when possible.



>
>It's all very well saying compressed only take 6 gigabytes (I have plenty) but
>If I have to have all 22 gigabytes uncompressed while making them before I can
>compress any then ouch, I don't think I can manage... I presume I could figure
>out which minors are used to generate any one base and carefully compress and
>uncompress accordingly, but directly using compressed minors would be ideal.
>

Aha... this I don't know about, but from a software engineering point of view
it would seem that he should already be using compressed files while building
new ones, since I would think that he uses the same probe code?

Eugene??



>One step further, generate in compressed form (I know that's probably even more
>ridiculous, but would hugely help those operating in limited disc space). Of
>course I know the other thing someone with limited space can do is
>download not generate them, but when I got 3 or 4 KB/s to Bob's FTP site
>I knew that wasn't going to be any use for me... Not having to pay
>the phone bill anyway... From work I get much, much faster FTP, but
>via my ISP (Freeserve) and modem looks much slower (maybe time of day
>was also relevant, early morning UK time much better than evening UK time
>since thg latter is daytime in US).
>
>Owen


Generating in compressed form would be a headache...



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