Mate in 115

[JVMerlino]

By default, Chessmaster 10 installs and uses the most useful 5-man tablebases (plus all of the 3-man and 4-man tbs, obviously). This is why it finds the mate in 115 instantly, as the KNNKP tb is installed. The reason that it doesn't quickly find mate in the position with 6 men is that there are no 6-man tablebases available for Chessmaster (as far as I'm aware).

FYI, here are the 5-man files that are installed by CM9000 (and I assume that the same ones are installed in CM 10):
KQRKR,KRQKR,KRKRR,KRRKR,KRBKR,KRKRB,KRNKR,KRKRN,KRPKR KRKRP,KQQKQ,KQKQQ,KQRKQ,KQKQR,KQBKQ,KQKQB,KQNKQ,KQKQN KQPKQ,KQKQP,KBBKN,KNKBB,KNNKP,KPKNN

CM uses its own tb format, written by Johan de Koning, also the author of the engine used in Chessmaster, called The King.

You can read all about the Chessmaster tablebases and FEG (the egtb generator) by going to:

ftp://ftp.ubisoft.com/games/chessmaster ... Readme.TXT

jm

[rabbits]

Thanks for that John.
Allan

[JVMerlino]

I just read over that FAQ again (it's been a long time since I wrote it), and FEG can indeed generate 6-man tablebases. I should have remembered that, because it was Marc Bourzhutschky who was the first person to generate all of them. This was back in 2002, and from what I recall it took a huge amount of time (more than four months) and about 2TB. Just generating RPPvR took three days and almost 2GB.

I believe Marc was also the first person to generate 7-man tablebases, along with Yakov Konoval.

http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/ ... urzutschky

jm