the whole 6 man set

[quade1337]

I am currently downloading the whole six man set. What type of advantage will I have when playing engine vs engine matches.

Edit: will it slow me down in 1/0 games?? and will it be more useful in long games?

[dcorbit]

I am currently downloading the whole six man set. What type of advantage will I have when playing engine vs engine matches.

Edit: will it slow me down in 1/0 games?? and will it be more useful in long games?

The only advantage the 6 man set will give you in engine engine matches is that it will play perfect chess in the endgame. Statistically speaking, all egtb studies for Elo gain have shown exactly 0 Elo for ordinary tablebase files and a modest gain for bitbase files. Of course, if you have a very fast disk subsystem, you may experience an Elo gain. The assumption that I have is that strong programs in the endgame will win anyway with a nearly bare chessboard and the cost of a lookup is approximately the same as the cost of the calculation. However, if you have super fast disk (e.g. RAM based drives) I would expect to see some Elo gain.

On the other hand, there is zero cost in an Elo sense and the engine will play literally perfect chess in the late endgame. So, from an artistic viewpoint, there is a big benefit, as I see it and it will not make your engine play worse.