Endgame Turbo 5 USB flash drive
Perfect endgame analysis and a huge increase in engine performance: Get it with the new Endgame Turbo 5! This brings the full 6-piece Syzygy endgame tablebases on a pendrive. Just plug it in a USB socket and you are set!
The arrival and availability of the five-piece tablebases were already a massive step forward in chess endgame understanding. Not only did they provide valuable and indisputable answers to a variety of positions that had been in debate, or in need of confirmation, but they taught us a tremendous amount about various classes of endgames. Consider GM John Nunn’s reference work, “Secrets of Rook Endings”. The title might lead one to think that it concerned all manner of endings with rooks, but in fact it covered only one specific subset: king and rook versus king, rook and pawn. For the unenlightened, this might seem to be excessively ‘geeky’ but it helped uncover valuable lessons on what positions can be won, which cannot, and how they are won or saved. Bear in mind this is also the single most common endgame encountered and where the most points are squandered either via missed wins or missed saves. It was also the first endgame book utterly based on computer-generated tablebases.
Imagine therefore what the advent of the six-piece tablebases meant. If the very first six-piece endgame to appear was at the beginning of the nineties, the very last one to be computed and to complete the set was published in 2005. At the time they were in the prevailing standard, the Nalimov tablebases, based on Nalimov’s important work that helped reduce the space required by a factor of eight. Even so, they took up a whopping 1.2 TB. While they could certainly be used by engines capable of handling Nalimov tablebases, they ran into a hard reality: for engine use within it search, it was just not going to work. 1.2 TB far exceeded the RAM memory of computers and the computers would freeze up as the hard disk went into overdrive searching the millions of positions per second the engine requested. Today this could theoretically be mitigated by storing them on a fast SSD drive, however, a 1.2 TB SSD (1200 GB) is neither easy to come by, much less readily affordable. For the less technically savvy, think of an SSD drive as a sort of large internal pen drive that can read things incredibly fast and that has none of the moving parts a magnetic hard drive has.
This meant that for most users the reality of a full 6-piece tablebase at home made little sense. They couldn’t really be used internally by an engine in any practical way, and if the point was to just consult positions, there were sites online that allowed on to set them up and search. The only people who really pursued ownership in such conditions were dedicated students of the endgame and professionals. This all changed in 2013, when a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, Ronald de Man, unveiled a new system that reduced this overall set by a factor of eight again and designed them specifically for easy use by engines.
It didn’t take long for all the top engines, whether commercial or amateur, to adopt them, including the top ones such as Komodo, Houdini and Stockfish, which seem to play musical chairs with the top spots in rating lists every few months. This new full set took up a ‘mere’ 151 GB, a huge improvement over the previous 1.2 TB. Still, this provided challenges for those who wanted to enjoy this new vanguard of chess endgame knowledge.
The first problem was simply in obtaining the complete 151 GB of files. Then there was the issue of setting them up so that the engine or program, such as ChessBase or Fritz, could take advantage of them. Finally, there was the hard reality that still persisted: to be usable without massive performance loss, they had to run from either a huge pen drive (over 151 GB) or an SSD. While SSD drives are certainly more common nowadays, modern machines (at the moment) usually come with SSD drives designed for the operating system, and maybe some programs, which do not leave 150+ GB of free space.
How can one sidestep all these technical hurdles with none of the specialized know-how implied? Enter ChessBase’s new Endgame Turbo 5. For the first time, ChessBase has forgone on the usual boxed sets of DVDs or CDs, since they would be hard-pressed to accommodate all the files needed, and furthermore, even with Bluray, there would be the matter of running them. In a practical all-in-one solution, not only does it come on a fully-equipped 128 GB pen drive with all the files, but it has an easy to use installation program so that you can just stick in your pen drive into a computer and enjoy the full set.
Endgame Turbo 5 USB flash drive
Perfect endgame analysis and a huge increase in engine performance: Get it with the new Endgame Turbo 5! This brings the full 6-piece Syzygy endgame tablebases on a pendrive. Just plug it in a USB socket and you are set!
Eagle-eyed readers will now ask how it is possible to fit 151 GB of files onto a 128 GB pen drive. This was done by removing the genuinely superfluous files until they fit and underwent well over a year of extensive testing. What files are considered superfluous? The most obvious ones would be piece combinations such as King and four queens against King, or King and three queens against King and a piece (any). The engine does not need any help to evaluate or win such a lopsided position, nor will its absence be detrimental to research and analysis. Then there are the many pointless sets, such as king and queen versus king and three knights. Sure, the evaluation is hardly obvious, but then you have to ask yourself how often you are likely to find a side with three knights at all, much less promoting a pawn to one to face a queen in a pawnless endgame. With no other instances removed, a complete uncompromising set was fit into the pen drive. If you’d like to skip the hassle and potential complications of obtaining and setting them up, then this is the simplest solution.
Still, there remains an important question beyond all this: how important and useful are they really? With engines able to reach amazing depths in the endgame, does a mere six-piece tablebase set make any difference? The answer is a resounding yes!
In a specialized computer chess forum, a statistician renowned for his thoroughness, Kai Laskos, took two top engines, Komodo and Stockfish and ran a special test. First 100 different positions with six pieces would be chosen, all of which were dead won according to the six-piece tablebases. Komodo and Stockfish were tasked with trying to win these 100 positions against the tablebases but using nothing more than their internal knowledge and calculations. Remember that these positions were all dead won. The result was that the engines were barely able to win one-third of the games!
Further tests were done over thousands of games to compare the Elo performances of engines using Syzygy, and those without. Komodo, for example, registered 35-40 Elo improvement with the Syzygy tablebases compared to its twin without.
Numbers are all great, and one can never ignore hard data when making claims of strength, but how about some practical positions (with more than six pieces) to illustrate? Our resident endgame expert, GM Karsten Mueller, was kind enough to send in some positions resulting from his years using them in his work.
In this position, the only drawing move is 62.Rc8! (For a full analysis, see last week's "Endgame tablebases: A short history")
Komodo 11 is actually capable of finding the move quite quickly, but it takes it over a minute on a fast quad-core desktop to understand Black is not winning. See its evaluation after a minute:
Not only does the engine above think Black is winning, but by a huge margin. However, this is without the benefit of the tablebases. With the tablebases, it sees things differently from the get-go:
The tb=718386 means that it consulted the tablebases 718,386 times in the first five seconds
These contrasts between evaluations with and without the tablebases abound. Consider the next endgame position:
For years, theory declared this position a draw and that it was a fortress. GM Karsten Mueller admits he himself was no exception and cannot claim credit for it being debunked. It was thanks to the endgame tablebases that this theory was disproved, and a solution was published.
Endgame Turbo 5 USB flash drive
Perfect endgame analysis and a huge increase in engine performance: Get it with the new Endgame Turbo 5! This brings the full 6-piece Syzygy endgame tablebases on a pendrive. Just plug it in a USB socket and you are set!
As you can see, anyone who wishes quick and far more precise endgame evaluations and results by an engine cannot be without such a set. It is also hard to be more convenient than on a pen drive, which can be plugged into any computer and set up in seconds with the mini-installation program on it. Note that it only needs to be installed once on each computer it is used.
Endgame Turbo 5 can be purchased from the ChessBase Shop
