Naturally this is just as much of an issue for computer chess engines as it is for humans. For the improving player, endgame study is interesting but also very challenging, in that there are innumerable situations where a seemingly simple or natural move can lead to disaster, or conversely the failure to find a very specific and unintuitive move can lead to a missed win. Now I’m diving into adding more substantive features, in this case support for Syzygy endgame tablebases.Įndgames have always been a prominent feature of chess study, and over the centuries millions of players have stared uncomprehendingly at difficult endgame studies, mate-in-3 puzzles, and similar things. Work on SpaceDog has been proceeding well, with lots of additions to its evaluation function, convenience features like outputting fully-diagrammed logs of each game you play against it, outputting games in PGN format, etc. My engine is named SpaceDog, in honour of my dog Laika, who is from space. All users of ChessOK Aquarium, Houdini Aquarium and Chess Assistant products get free access to the service for the period specified in their product description.In the background, while tons of work stuff has been happening, I’ve been continuing my mission to write a fully-featured computer chess engine in the C programming language. Lomonosov Tablebases will be accessible online from the Aquarium interface and on the website. The total volume of all tablebases is 140 000 gigabytes, which is obviously too much for personal computers. The calculations for 6 pieces playing against a lone king weren’t done because the outcome is rather obvious. In 2005, 6-piece endings were solved in Nalimov Tablebases which are now used by many professional chess programs and services.Įxperts didn’t expect 7-piece endings to be cracked and catalogued until after 2015, but Convekta Ltd, namely programmers Zakharov and Makhnichev - the developers of the Aquarium interface - managed to solve this task in just 6 months using a new algorithm designed specifically for this purpose and run on the Lomonosov supercomputer based in the Moscow State University.Īs a result, we now have 525 tablebases of the 4 vs.

In the beginning of the 90-s, the same task was done for 5-pieces.

The first ending tablebases - for all 4-piece endgames - were built by the end of the 80-s.

Tablebase endgame online