[dba-Tech] Questions about 2 Unusual Databases

Arthur:

I might use an array of 32 bytes where each byte represents a square on the 
board and the contents of that byte describes the piece , if any, occupying 
that square.

If you want to get into bit twiddling, it could probably be done in less 
than 32 bytes.  There are 6 different pieces, yes, pawn, rook, knight, 
bishop, queen, king.  and two colors. So it seems that the numbers 1 through 
12 could represent all the pieces of both colors.

Rocky

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arthur Fuller" <artful at rogers.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" 
<dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 5:46 PM
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Questions about 2 Unusual Databases


> Thanks for responding! Doubly interesting.... On the first case, part of 
> the reason I keep coming back to this is that I have a gut feeling that 
> brute force is all wrong for this application. What I have in mind is a 
> sort of double-perspective on any given chess situation -- one that 
> records the sequence and the other that records the absolute position, so 
> that any two positions could be compared very rapidly without having to go 
> through the move-sequences to build it. Not to suggest that the following 
> is anywhere near an optimal model for recording the latter piece, but 
> let's just say it might look something like this....
> There are 64 squares and at most two pairs of 16 pieces. (Convenient 
> numbers from a computing viewpoint.) So we could have a 1-D array of 64 
> elements or a 2-D array of 8*8 elements to reprsent the squares. Regarding 
> the pieces, we need to distinguish white from black, but we do not need to 
> distinguish Queen's knight from King's. The front row (at setup) is an 
> array of 8 pawns; the back row is a ragged array of 3 pairs (rook, knight, 
> bishop) and perhaps another pair or two single-element items, Q and K.
> To record any given position, we need to note the square of interest, the 
> piece that's sitting on it and the colour of said piece. If we could map 
> this compactly and effectively, we could also search it rapidly, I think. 
> Let's say for the sake of argument that positions P1 and P2 differ by only 
> one piece's position. Let's further say that we have employed a legion of 
> low-wage workers to plug in the Book of Endings. Then (and here comes a 
> large leap of faith) any position P3 could be compared to any known and 
> similar position P4 that is guaranteed to result in victory (or defeat). 
> I.e., P3 can be compared with P4 (victory) and the relatively small 
> problem of how to get from here to there can be concentrated upon. If I 
> can paint you into said corner, then I'm guaranteed to win and the rest is 
> rote.
>
> ----------------
> On problem two, I guess that we have both invested some time in this 
> investigation, and that's (for me at least) a good thing. I tackled it in 
> various ways, from studying and playing music to taking various academic 
> courses and reading the literature on various investigations from 
> researchers (not to say I'm in any way expert, but I have read some). From 
> I gather, the most accurate vector of prediction is what you have 
> previously listened to. As it happens, I am either "eclectic" or musically 
> promiscuous -- you choose. I have almost everything Beethoven wrote, and 
> Bach, and also Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Talking Heads, the Clash and 
> Zakir Hussain, to name only a few. This opens me to radical new musics in 
> a way that is simply unavailable to people acquainted with only one or two 
> genres and only four or five decases of same. I'm not trying to toot my 
> horn here, and if the previous sentence reads that way then I apologize. 
> Here's another perspective on the point I'm attempting to make: when I 
> started studying classical guitar about -- god! -- 35 years ago, it took 
> me on average about 20 minutes to tune the guitar. Once two notes got very 
> close to each other, I had a very difficult time determining which one was 
> higher than the other. A gifted friend of mine cleared up the mud with a 
> simple instruction: listen to the wa-wa-wa as you compare the notes. The 
> faster the wa-wa-wa, the further the notes are apart. Adjust the pegs and 
> make the wa-wa-wa slower. Once it gets to a "wa" per second, you're close 
> enough for folk music. After he told me that, my time to tune shrank 
> dramatically, and now I can sit in the back row of a nightclub and tell 
> you in seconds who's out of tune.
> That doesn't mean that my taste in music is "better" than anyone else's. 
> (We've all met stupid lawyers.) But it does say on the one hand that I can 
> probably tell you whether a given melody was lifted from Bach, even if it 
> was transposed and inverted and the instrumentation was changed.
> When I was in university I took a course called "History of Music." Doctor 
> Ursula Rempel told us in the first class that the exam would be to listen 
> to 20 fragments of music (each 10 seconds long), and we'd have to identify 
> the type of work, the movement if possible, the composer if possible, and 
> the year in which it was written (within 20 years). When the good doctor 
> said that, I thought there's no way in the world I could possibly do that. 
> This incidentally was a summer course; I attended class every day for 6 
> weeks. By exam time I thought that 10 seconds was an absurdly long time 
> for each question. Ms. Rempel had taught me how to recognize Renaissance, 
> Baroque, Rococo, Classical, Romantic, Late Romantic, Early Modern, 12-tone 
> etc. almost instantly... and it was almost as easy to say this is German 
> as opposed to Italian. A few trick questions could undermine you... for 
> example, Schubert is pretty close to Beethoven, and Carl Czerny is even 
> closer, and certain composers make a point of trying to confuse you with 
> era. But the fact is that most of the time I can tell you (within the 
> classical European, jazz and East-Indian classical music traditions) who 
> is playing and what composition type is being played within seconds. If 
> it's tricky, it might take me a minute, and if it takes me longer than 
> that then I'm just guessing.
> All the foregoing was about music from the dare I say it, educated 
> listener's point of view. This axis has virtually nothing to do with what 
> will sell. I like to think that I have an ear for quality (don't we all), 
> and I have a certain amount of evidence to cite. Not a lot of said 
> evidence concerns record sales, but rather longevity. There are things you 
> can do in the world of European classical music that are impossible in 
> other genres. For example, I have approximately 20 recordings of Igor 
> Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" and I can tell you without hesitation which 
> one I consider the best, and even play fragments from the various versions 
> to justify my position. You can't do that with rock, or movies, or most 
> other musical genres. To a lesser extend you can do it with jazz.
> So where am I going with this? I don't want to go into the corner thats 
> says great music is only for those who know. Neither do I want to go into 
> the corner that says that someone who has listened only to punk or rap or 
> disco or classical Indian music can pronounce upon what is great music. I 
> think that a LOT more perspective is required, and a much larger 
> time-frame.
> You proposed a much simpler proposition that is much easier to test. Let's 
> just hope you don't come up with the musical equivalent of "Famous Dogs of 
> the Civil War." Even if it does sell a jillion copies this year.
>
> LOL. I do tend to ramble on.
> A.
> There's a rule in S-F writing circles: introduce exactly 1 radical new 
> concept and base your book upon that. There are numerous exceptions to 
> this rule: to cite just three, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Philip 
> Kerr. But in general, I think that the rule holds. It doesn't guarantee 
> success, by any means, but it does describe many and perhaps the majority 
> of successful S-F novels.
> I vaguely recall a joke about this sort of analysis, too. Some book 
> publisher decided to search for the three most successful themes in 
> novels, thereby to derive the formula for the next blockbuster, and after 
> all the data was sifted and the numbers crunched, the software proposed 
> "Famous Dogs of The Civil War."
> So in fact, your perspective (I think -- don't let me put words in your 
> mouth), you nest two other questions and possibly three. IOW, you identify 
> one axis as the measure of the database's success: future sales of the 
> proposed artwork. That's fine, as far as it goes, but I think it does not 
> go very far... except, assuming success, all the way to the bank. What I 
> must applaud about this approach is its scientific perspective (i.e. 
> prediction and control) -- you propose a case that can be tested 
> objectively in a relatively small time-frame, whereas lofty frames of 
> reference such as "greatness", "beauty", "influence over subsequent 
> composers" etc. require much more subjectivity and much larger 
> time-frames.
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