The following infomation concerns the endgame databases used in Nemesis:

• What does an 8 piece database mean?
  When Nemesis sees a position with 8 pieces or less on the board, it can look up that position in the 8 piece database and know immediately if that position is a win, draw or loss.
• What is the advantage of this?
  Many positions with 8 pieces are extremely difficult to understand. Armed with immediate knowledge like this, Nemesis does not have to spend any time unravelling the complexities of such positions and becomes and far more effective and dangerous player. The Chinook program used its own 8 piece databases to good effect in its tournaments and man-machine title matches.
• So this advantage only happens when we have exchanged down to 8 pieces or less on the board?
  No, even from the start position, Nemesis can search down to positions with 8 pieces or less on the board and looks up the database. The advantage of the 8 piece database is apparent in all positions that Nemesis is analysing.
• How large are the databases?
  The 8 piece database contains 440,005,309,505 positions and compresses to 6,051,539,199 bytes.
  The 7 piece database contains 36,815,058,944 positions and compresses to 407,583,149 bytes.
• How does Nemesis handle such large databases? Surely access to them will be too slow?
  A special memory manager has been designed to provide 3 levels of memory caching to assist with database performance. The memory manager is highly optimised to reduce I/O requests to your hard disk and to utilise as much memory as possible (constrained by limits). With the recommended memory requirements, the endgame databases perform efficiently well. The more memory you can add to your system, the better Nemesis performs, as more of the databases can be cached in memory, which is faster.
• How was this database generated? How long did it take? What hardware did you use?
  A program was designed to generate databases in an efficient manner. the 1 to 8 piece database was generated in 1 month for 4x4 positions, on a twin Pentium III/600Mhz system with 1Gb of memory. The entire 440 billion positions was generated in 3 months on the same system.
• Will there be bigger databases in future?
  Yes, the nemesis.info team plan to build up to 10 piece databases, which would be 39,186,084,220,897 positions (39 Trillion). This feat will not be accomplished for many years.
• Has the 8 piece database corrected any published play?
  Absolutely. many published lines thought to be wins have been corrected to draws, and some positions thought to be draws are in fact wins or losses. For example in the famous checker book "Boland's bridges", there are 267 problem settings. Nemesis has found at least 13 of these settings were assigned the wrong result by Boland.
• Can I set up a position with 8 pieces or less and ask Nemesis for the correct result?
  Yes you can.
• Is the 8 piece database different to the Chinook databases?
  Yes, the Nemesis database is different to the Chinook database. It was generated independently. The Chinook team did not make their 8 piece database publically available. However the two databases contain the same level of information, i.e. win/draw/loss per position.
• Does the 8 piece database make Nemesis the strongest program out there?
  We believe Nemesis is stronger than any other program, including Chinook when it retired in 1996. However this is not just because of the 8 piece database. It is a combination of factors including opening database, a redesigned search algorithm and evaluation function, and complex search extensions. The 8 piece database alone would not have made Nemesis the strongest program out there.