EGTB's accesed from the internet?

[bob]

I have one. It is nowhere near SCSI. And I do mean _nowhere_ near...

[jwes]

You can easily do that. But the cost is prohibitive, in that the program will play so incredibly weakly because of the internet latency. Currently you do a probe and get an answer back in a few milliseconds. On the internet, multiply that by 100 or 1000, and it would absolutely kill the search speed.

dependent on what you do.
There is no rule that you have to look at tablebases at every node.

A program may try to access the internet only when the root position is already tablebases position.

Uri

That's not going to win you many games. Many KRP vs KR endings are drawn, but some are winnable. How do you reach a winnable one, rather than a drawn one, if you rely on your program until you get into the position. Then it is too late.

EGTBs are not very useful if not used inside the search...

You can use bitbases inside the eearch and then use the internet tablebases at the root.

[guyhaw]

It would certainly be useful to have access to EGBBs and EGTBs across the internet when search-speed is not really the issue.
This is the case when analysing the integrity of Chess Studies when they are actually in EGT-land. Even today, Study composers and even judges do not check Studies using the available EGTBs because they are not necessarily available on their machines.
Interesting ponts from Rob Hyatt on disc performance. I'll say again that DTZ EGTBs are half the size of DTM EGTBs and, from that point of view, it is a pity that the DTMate EGTBs are 'the norm'.
g

[bob]

You can easily do that. But the cost is prohibitive, in that the program will play so incredibly weakly because of the internet latency. Currently you do a probe and get an answer back in a few milliseconds. On the internet, multiply that by 100 or 1000, and it would absolutely kill the search speed.

dependent on what you do.
There is no rule that you have to look at tablebases at every node.

A program may try to access the internet only when the root position is already tablebases position.

Uri

That's not going to win you many games. Many KRP vs KR endings are drawn, but some are winnable. How do you reach a winnable one, rather than a drawn one, if you rely on your program until you get into the position. Then it is too late.

EGTBs are not very useful if not used inside the search...

You can use bitbases inside the eearch and then use the internet tablebases at the root.

That doesn't address the problem he was talking about. Perhaps you can fit the 6-piece bitbases into ram. Somehow I doubt it. But even if so, that just pushes the issue off one level, because the 7's can't even be made yet, much less fit into realistic RAM sizes, and then the problem returns...

[jshriver]

and there is no technology in the foreseeable future that would create a removable storage device with more capacity than a DVD.

There's Blu-Ray which I think is 25gigs per disc, but at this point with 6-men and hopefully 7 men, the only real way to store them is on HD's.

As for the rest of your question, SOAP and a backend server with a lot of hard drive space and bandwidth. So yes it's possible.