Time travel problem again.Ovyron wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2019 9:29 amBut this discussion has been never about *me*. Switch me for anybody else, and the person you switch me for would have a database that works for everything they'll need in their life. Switch me for *you*, and now it's you who would have something you couldn't tell apart from EGTB32 if you had access to them (because you'd only need covered the positions you'd check, not all of chess.)chrisw wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2019 5:12 pmAh! I thought this was a philosophical discussion about approaching some perfect database (map) for everybody to use.
But it turns out to be about a database of your games plus a chess engine to operate on the leaf nodes in the database, at the time of meeting them, and dependent on what your opponent did to get you there.
Let me remind you how these discussions started, I was talking to Uri Blass about this, and he was claiming that this was impossible to do. The discussions turned about how it'd be impossible even in principle, to being impossible because of time constrains to being impossible because we don't have where to store them to being impossible because of time travel requirements.
But if in the end you accept it is possible for a single person (which in the examples was me) then you have to accept that it'd be possible for at least 2 persons (someone else just does what I'm doing.) And then 3.
What is the maximum number of persons that would be able to have a such database for the positions they'll see on their life?
I claim that anybody in the world that wanted to know the best move ranked in a position could have it. Not everyone in the world is going to request a position checked. Not all positions, just those requested. noobpwnftw could actually give us data about how many people have visited his site and how many positions have been queried (those where you have to click a request because the position you want information about is outside of the DB) to get an idea of the positions that would need to be checked for a chess map.
If you only fulfill the wishes of the people interested, and only about the positions that interest them, a chess map for everyone is within reach. And who knows if nobody will ever be interested in a 1.f3 f6 variation, so everyone wanting to solve chess with the tablebase approach is a fool, because we could already have solutions of some 9piece and 10piece endgames instead of trying to build a 8men monstrosity full of positions nobody will ever check.
What you MIGHT need in some future time line is the SUM of all possible time lines from the present point. Which brings you back to the space problem again. Not enough space, nor time to generate the data to fill the space.
It is surely true your past history can be stored in a database, ChessBase for example, but your future histories not, you don’t know what they are and the possible permutations are explosively too great.