I finally downloaded 6-men Syzygy, performed CRC, put them on HDD, and WDL tables additionally on a 128 GB USB 3.0 stick. I played several thousands games to have a feel about them with both Stockfish and Komodo, but here I will present only Komodo 10.4 results, as Syzygy is more flexible there ("Smart Syzygy" option to probe 5-men from depth=2 irrespective of 6-men Probe Depth). Playing games is the only option to determine strength here, as for different Probe Depths, the search tree is different. What I found is that if keeping all (DTZ+WDL) tables on HDD, 6-men (with many different Probe Depth values) don't give improvement over 5-men on USB, oftentimes performing even worse for small Probe Depths. Both give about 10-15 ELO points over non-Syzygy (for Probe Depth=24 from HDD) from endgame starting positions. However, with 6-men WDL tables on USB stick (DTZ on HDD), I got 35-40 ELO points improvement from Komodo with 6-men (Probe Depth=12) over non-Syzygy Komodo from these endgame starting positions. Here is some example run (gauntlet against non-Syzygy). It is also worth noting NPS and Depth reached as shown by LittleBlitzer:
Code: Select all
Games Completed = 3000 of 3000 (Avg game length = 16.234 sec)
Settings = Gauntlet/32MB/200ms per move/M 600000cp for 1000 moves, D 120000 moves/EPD:C:\LittleBlitzer\End_789_13_17.epd(897)
Time = 13265 sec elapsed, 0 sec remaining
1. K NO Syzygy 1418.5/3000 736-899-1365 (L: m=899 t=0 i=0 a=0) (tpm=199.9 d=24.84 nps=2736335)
2. K Syzygy-6 USB WDL PD=12 545.5/1000 325-234-441 (L: m=234 t=0 i=0 a=0) (tpm=189.0 d=24.50 nps=2321309)
3. K Syzygy-6 HDD WDL PD=24 513.5/1000 279-252-469 (L: m=252 t=0 i=0 a=0) (tpm=197.4 d=23.23 nps=1880441)
4. K Syzygy-5 USB PD=2 522.5/1000 295-250-455 (L: m=250 t=0 i=0 a=0) (tpm=193.6 d=24.99 nps=2573741)
"Smart Syzygy" was always "true" with 3-4-5-6-men tables. I would imagine that from SSD, the 6-men gains might be even more spectacular. With 128 GB SSD, it is probably advisable to put WDL on them. Also, with 6-men, my i7 PC (8 GB RAM) became almost unresponsive during some matches, due to RAM caching.