I came across these two utilities while studying chess engine in endgames and looking for other tablebases aside from Scorpio' bitbase:
Hoffman: It's an open-source tablebase generator for chess endgames by Brent Baccala. Hoffman calculates chess tablebases, which are large files containing all possible configurations of chess pieces in an endgame and the best play to either win or draw. http://www.freesoft.org/software/hoffman/
and
Retrochess: allows to analyze and search for chess positions in endgame if the corresponding tablebase is constructed. Uses an external dll for probing. It has a 'Chessdll.dll' (w/ code) created for other chess projects that could use the constructed bases as stated. And it can generate 3-4-5-6-7 men! http://generatorchess.qsh.ru/Default.aspx
Has anyone tried these yet? I can't access Kirill's forum at the moment so i posted it here.
This is the the right forum now. Maybe I could hear some views!
Hoffman as I Remember was a command line program & I don't like that, I don't know if anything have changed lately, Retrochess on the other hand seems more promising I plan to test it this weekend, the seqence that I have on my mind involves generating certain related tablebases & do some tests & compare with Nalimov's.
Comparing the stats is not easy, as they may use some different form of indexing. Furthermore Nalimov uses the DTM format and I don't know about Retrochess.
Certainly I'm not going to compare a lot of positions just a little bit in order to know that Retrochess is reliable especially in 5 & 6 men since I have All the 5 men & all pawnless 6 men & 100 GB of the pawned ones.
The strange thing about retrochess is we don't know who's behind it & where to find more about it. but I'm trying it anyway.
