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there are 50 moves without a piece being taken or a pawn being moved, the game is
drawn. Since the data can be accessed in RAM very fast and effectively the Syzygy
Endgame Tablebases are now used exclusively by many modern chess engines.
For instance, the Komodo chess engine only uses the Syzygy tablebases during the
search, but it also uses the Nalimov tablebases when a position is on the board. It is
to be expected that the Syzygy tablebases will become increasingly popular with
engine developers.
The best way to get the complete Syzygy Endgame Tablebases is to buy the Endgame
Turbo 4 from our online shop.
Because of the size of the tablebases it is best to install them outside of the
Documents folder, for instance in C:/Tablebases/.
There are two different types of Syzygy tablebases.
WDL (Win-Draw-Loss).
In these files only information about the result of the position is stored. This is the
only information used in the search. Based on this information the chess engine cannot
tell how many moves it will take to win the game. The engine is merely informed
whether the position is a Win, a Loss or a Draw.
DTZ (Distance to zero).
These tablebases are used by the GUI to generate a value which states how many
moves it will take to win the game. Some engines use this information during the
search.
The Syzygy tablebases support bitbases in both WDL and DTZ format. The latter
format is only used when an exact position is already on the board. However, only the
number of moves to reach another endgame (or sometimes checkmate). Another
endgame begins after any move that resets the 50 move rule. By this definition, every
time a piece is taken or a pawn moves a new endgame has begun and the count is set
to 1. If a pawn keeps advancing, after every move the count is 1 again. That means
that the count is reset after every move which changes the position irreversibly.
This means that the Syzygy Endgame Tablebases are different to the tablebases that
have been used until now. This means that the moves to mate are not necessarily
displayed, but the moves to the transition into another endgame. When sorting the
moves pawn, capture and promotion moves are put first, because these are the moves
that bring the game forwards.
For example, if you are using the Komodo 8 engine to analyse a 5 or 6 piece endgame
that can definitely be won, the Syzygy tableBases might give an evaluation of +250.
There is no longer a display of "Mate in x moves".
As in the case of the Nalimov tablebases there are 290 files for the 3/4/5-piece
endgames, but they are differently distributed. The Nalimov tablebases have two files
per endgame, one for "White To Move", one for "Black To Move". The Syzygy
tablebases only need one file, regardless of who is moving, but there are two versions
of each tablebase: one contains the WDL (Win-Draw-Loss) result and the other
contains the DTZ (Distance-To-Zero) result.
ChessBase 2016