syzygy wrote:abulmo2 wrote:You forgot the dtz50 table:
You were not talking about dtz50 tables:
apart for a few trivial cases that a 1 ply search can decipher.
A 1-ply search is insufficient to solve KRvK and KQvK.
Moreover, you cut my quote where the important sentence was the following one:
Of course the same can be said for many 4-men to 8-men tables
Ah duh... Why do you think the 4-, 5- and 6-men tables do not efficiently store the trivial cases?
For example, are the 5-men positions with an isolated king usefull?
They are very useful because they cut down the size of the 4v2 tables.
I understand that as a table maker, you want to be exhaustive; but I guess you could agree that an incomplete 7-men table restricted to hard to decipher positions are somewhat more usefull than a bunch of trivial 3,4,5 and 6-men positions.
Do you realise that that bunch of trivial positions takes up less space than 0.1% of a non-trivial 7-men table? There is nothing to save here.
I want the "absurd" tables too.
Besides the interesting statistics, consider the number of drawn positions in
KQQQQQk.
It's huge.
Of course, in a case like that, a tempo is a precious quantity for the disadvantaged side.
Let's look at the down-side:
Very small amount of space consumed by tables that will not be called during game play.
Very small amount of time lost during computation.
And not the positives:
Simplification of computation of other tables.
Mathematical completeness.
Interesting statistics generated.
And when you are done, you can delete any files you don't want.
It seems a no-brainer to me.
Taking ideas is not a vice, it is a virtue. We have another word for this. It is called learning.
But sharing ideas is an even greater virtue. We have another word for this. It is called teaching.