mhalstern wrote:Ok,
I'l run it tomorrow morning, before I leave for work. I'll report the results.
Cool, thanks.
mhalstern wrote:
I have 6 gig of DDR3 Ram, if that is important for the result.
DDR3 RAM is awesome. The program uses just under 1 GB to load all of its data in RAM, so you will be fine.
mhalstern wrote:
What Checker Programs can use your database?
I've been chatting with the programmer of GUI Checkers and sent him my access code and loading routines for the 6-piece database you are computing. He's already sent me a revised version that can use these databases. I made sure that the lookup time to retrieve a result is faster than any move generator can generate a single move, so the beauty of this is the program is NEVER slowed down by a database probe! It plays a wicked game.
I'm also writing my own program, called
Only Perfect Checkers. The name is kind of a pun. How can something be "only" perfect?

But the other meaning of the name is that is "only" probes the perfect-play databases (what the chess community would call Distance To Win Tablebases) and it will use the database hits to guide its search. There will be a "material only" evaluation function, but no positional terms at all.
mhalstern wrote:
Before you tie up the pc for 6 -7 months, get a copy of Rybka 3, and download a good opening book and purchase a playchess.com account. Play 500 Blitz Games and see if you can make #1. If you don't have the time and don't mind spending a little money, play a few games to see how good your hardware is.
I'll probably do something like that. I'm still a little ways away from starting the computation run. I'm still writing the parallel building manager, which will execute the next portion of the build based on the previously solved data. The big difference is I will have 4 computers x 8 cores each doing work, saving data to both SSD drives and 10,000 RPM drives. I need to put the portions that will most likely need the fastest lookup times from disk on the SSD drives, but some of these occur later in the build. I don't want to have these drives idle for too long, so I need a mixed approach if I want to save months of computation.
I am still staging this and doing tests.