NEWS: FinalGen chess endgame tablebase generator.

[pPerez]

I know that the software has some graphical interface limitations.

Besides the ones you mentioned, you cannot, for example, enter a FEN position, you cannot flip the board, and you don't have a "back" button to undo moves on the chessboard.

At this moment, the enhancements to improve the generation itself take priority over the graphical user interface enhancements.

The problem is that the program has been developed in assembly language and these things are hard to implement.

However, the possibility of showing next moves after "not available" is not a graphical issue and it can be interesting.
I'll take a look. I think I had a good reason to not show them, but I don't remember why.

Remark: Please, use my email address finalgen@mtu-media.com to make suggestions. I am not sure I will be able to answer to questions on all forums.

[Arpad Rusz]

OK, thanks for your answer.

[IGarcia]

Jouni , the “unexpected error” you got has been caused because the antivirus removed some dll’s and the program could not work properly.

Regards
Pedro Pérez Romero

I have 2 zips:

Code: Select all

FinalGenSetup.zip ( md5= CD66CF1055A409E45961918D708F8AC2 ) Has inside...
FinalGenSetup.exe ( md5= 1CD899434C5436167890B2ECA33C12E2 ) Which installs...
the INFECTED dll ( Avir reports: TR/Kazy.43678 ) in file:
/Program Files/FinalGen/DA_D8.dll 

FinalGenSetup.zip ( md5= EBAC63C1B14629EFEE2C8E02C9104E15 )Has inside...
FinalGenSetup.exe ( md5= 6468FAA24F80551AEDA9B169E8AFA53F ) Which installs...
the  INFECTED dll ( Avir reports: TR/Malob.GX.16 ) in file:
/Program Files/FinalGen/CTDD1.dll 

So far, I don't know which is a false alarm, and which is the real trojan. Would be nice a better explanation. Thanks.

Ignacio

[jshriver]

Looks like an interesting piece of software. Congrats to the author and thanks for his contribution.

Is there any chance it could be used to build egtb files, and a modest library for engine authors to probe it?

-Josh

[pPerez]

Ignacio,

The new version 1.1 has been released.

The best thing you can do is to get rid of all previous versions, that is, uninstall the software, delete all setup files and download the new one.

In the new version:

1- A new status "Unsolved" has been introduced to differentiate unsolved positions from non-generated ones. Next moves of unsolved positions are available.
2- New Copy/Paste FEN buttons. Although no GUI modifications were initially planned, many people asked for those buttons, and this is the reason why they have been implemented.

The new version is also free of false alarms:
FinalGen 1.1 passed successfully all scans from Virustotal, Virscan and jotti.virscan on 18/05/2012

http://www.mtu-media.com/finalgen

Regards

Pedro

[pPerez]

Hello Joshua

I'm currently working on a library that will allow developpers to have access to the generated tablebases.

If I have understood well what "egtb files" means, then I can say that the working folder will act as a big egtb file.

Regards

Pedro

[Michel]

This seems like wonderful software. Please keep working on it!

Michel

[Jouni]

Version 1.1 now works with Avast so I did some testing. It works as promised. But there is a big problem. It's so slow. Stockfish 2.2.2 in 4 best mode solved examples in FinalGen homepage very fast in most cases. Solution times

1) no solution - is this proven to be correct?
2) 5s
3) 0s
4) 30s
5) 15s
6) 0s
7) 30s for best move, but no draw
8) 0s
9) 0s
10) 10s

And FinalGen takes hours for some of these. Yes SF don't give exact draw or mate score, but still "solves" these positions.

[Ajedrecista]

Hello:

I have just realized that FinalGen 1.3 is out thanks to this thread of Chess2U Forum. A little more info can be read from this topic:

Version 1.3 released, Version 2.0 suspended

The Version 1.3 of FinalGen contains the following improvements:

- German version. Thanks to Stefan Jörger for his valuable help

- Some incompatibility problems regarding Windows 7 and Windows XP 64 bits were fixed:

1. In some Windows versions, the user was not able to introduce the working folder. => FIXED

2. In Windows 7, the program was not able to write in the installation folder, causing "unexpected" errors => FIXED

A litle issue could not be resolved: Sometimes, the chessboard is truncated. I could not reproduce this bug in my system, so I could not fix it.
If you have this problem, just set the icon size to "small" and the chessboard will be displayed correctly.

Initially, I had planned the version 2.0 (a multiprocess one), that could have improved the performance a lot. But I faced some technical problems.
One of them was the hard disk access. When two or more processes read from the hard disk simultaneously, the multiprocess version was often slower than the monoprocess one!

The only solution to overcome this issue is to develop a 64-bit version. This is not easy, the program cannot be adapted, it must be re-developed, because it was written in assembly language.

So the multiprocess version will have to wait.

Enjoy!

Regards from Spain.

Ajedrecista.

[duncan]

Just came across this paper. Pity the finalgen forum has been spammed/corrupted recently.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... iscoveries


Summary
FINALGEN works beyond today’s endgame table limit of seven men, bringing definitive knowledge to
the table, providing benchmark standards of play and resolving questions that have remained unanswer-
ed for as long as thirty years. In the context of current technology, it has untapped potential both as a
working program and as a concept.
It is currently single-threaded but the principles of concurrent programming are well known and cpu
chips continue to offer more cores and processing threads. PC B’s 4-lane PCIe v3.0 interface to its SSD
provides over 1GB/s but PCIe v5.0 (PCI-SIG, 2019) in 16-lane mode promises to offer 16 times the
bandwidth, effectively reducing disc-latency to zero. Romero (2012) provides code libraries to interface
chess engines to FINALGEN EGTs: we do not believe these have been used yet. FINALGEN does not
create value-only EGTs as de Man et al (2018) do. Nor does it use two ideas exploited in Bleicher’s
FREEZER (Müller, 2005), namely trial-constraints on the chessmen and interfacing to precomputed
EGTs. The full analyses (Müller and Haworth, 2019) show how truncated FINALGEN’s searches would
be if 7-man EGTs could be consulted. These considerations suggest that the efficient creation of
FINALGEN-type EGTs could be a part of chess engines’ runtime calculations.
More immediately, a growing FINALGEN community, centred around the forum (Romero, 2012) could
evolve and share future results. Endgame tables now give instant answers for 7-man positions but
FINALGEN can address many positions with eight men or more. The examples here will hopefully
inspire others to show what is possible in creating further unarguable insights into the game of ches