Generating all 6-men EGDB (Chessmaster).

[jkominek]

An obscure historical question for JVMerlino, who wrote the (engagingly written) FEG Readme text, if he is still checking this thread.

From section V. AN ENDGAME DATABASE FAQ ============

Q: What EGDBs have actually been built?
A: In the 1970's there was quite some reasearch on the topic. However, it
became interesting after Ken Thompson dedicated a machine for several
years to produce most of the interesting 5 piece EGDBs (DTC), and
eventually made them available on CD for free. In the early 90's Stiller
did some work on a massive parallel system on 6 pieces, but he couldn't
save the data. In the meanwhile Edwards redid the 5 pieces for DTM but
mainly for research, without compression. Nalimov redid them again, but
used compression (better than Thompson's, but still larger because of
DTM). Nalimov's have been widely used since 1999. This is all public
knowledge. Not public were the Koning & Kuijf experments, done since
1995. These experiments were targeted at building EGDBs fast, and
succeeded in being fast. Though the actual data is more or less the same
as Nalimov's.

Who was Kuijf, the Johan deKoning collaborator mentioned? That is a name I do not recognize. Searching computer chess discussion boards does not seem to lead to an answer, but I might not be looking in the right place.

I wonder how far the original poster has progressed in generating 7-men tables.

[Ajedrecista]

Hello John:

An obscure historical question for JVMerlino, who wrote the (engagingly written) FEG Readme text, if he is still checking this thread.

From section V. AN ENDGAME DATABASE FAQ ============

Q: What EGDBs have actually been built?
A: In the 1970's there was quite some reasearch on the topic. However, it
became interesting after Ken Thompson dedicated a machine for several
years to produce most of the interesting 5 piece EGDBs (DTC), and
eventually made them available on CD for free. In the early 90's Stiller
did some work on a massive parallel system on 6 pieces, but he couldn't
save the data. In the meanwhile Edwards redid the 5 pieces for DTM but
mainly for research, without compression. Nalimov redid them again, but
used compression (better than Thompson's, but still larger because of
DTM). Nalimov's have been widely used since 1999. This is all public
knowledge. Not public were the Koning & Kuijf experments, done since
1995. These experiments were targeted at building EGDBs fast, and
succeeded in being fast. Though the actual data is more or less the same
as Nalimov's.

Who was Kuijf, the Johan deKoning collaborator mentioned? That is a name I do not recognize. Searching computer chess discussion boards does not seem to lead to an answer, but I might not be looking in the right place.

I wonder how far the original poster has progressed in generating 7-men tables.

While John answers, I have found an article at Chess Programming Wiki that could be the man:

Hans Kuijf

[...] Already during the 80s, along with Nico Kuijf, Hans Kuijf developed the Chess databases NICBase and TascBase. Further, Hans Kuijf was involved in the Database programming of Chessmaster 6000 and 7000. He continued his work with Johan de Koning on the Clobber program Pan, [...]

So, there can be a doubt between Hans and Nico.

Regards from Spain.

Ajedrecista.