After finishing the KPKP end game table I thought it is time now to make them available to the engine. For that I wrote a endgame advisor class that is able to access the stored table information.
Whenever the engine encounters a position with 4 or less pieces it asks the advisor whether it has a known score for that position, and if the answer is yes, it takes its score as value for the position and terminates the search in that branch of the search tree.
To ask the advisor upfront is necessary because not all possible 4 man positions are available. So far I only generated the ones where each side has one piece left. All positions where one side has 2 pieces and the other side has none are not available yet.
Those positions are not particular interesting as in general they are easy to win. It does not seem to make a lot of sense to dedicate disk space or memory to a table like king and 2 queens vs lone king. However tables like king and 2 bishops or king, bishop and knight vs king might be interesting. Because they contain long sometimes hard to might mate sequences.
On the other hand those endgames are very rare in practice and probably the engine will never encounter one in an actual game.
So this concludes my work on the endgame knowledge. With the 3 and 4 man tables available my engine has now a cheap and very accurate endgame DRAW detection. It took quite some time and was an very interesting exercise to work with the tables.
I will not continue with 5 man tables. There are some very important ones, like king, rook and pawn vs. king and rook, but the time to generate the tables is too long and they require to much space. So I will not include them into the engine package anyway. Those positions my engine has to solve by calculating.
A little space to track the efforts spent on my hobby: Chess Programming
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