7 piece tablebase "benefit"

[jp]

[This post replaces the previous one, which I was editing when the website froze.]

Stockfish has a UCI option to turn off the 50 move rule for 7 men or less , which works on the command line, but whether it works in a GUI is dependent on the specific GUI being used. Some GUIs enforce the 50 move rule regardless if the engine says to ignore it.

IIRC (from previous discussion) that SF option does not do what we want.

Update: I found relevant posts...

You might give Moonfish a try. https://github.com/joergoster/Moonfish

If you set "Syzygy50MoveRule" to false, this will also switch it off for the search.

Thanks Joerg. Do you know when using “regular” Stockfish if you turn off the Syzygy50Moverule does the main program still enforce the 50-move-rule. It doesn't seem make sense that it would. I mean, what good would it do to switch it off for TB's and still have the program enforce the rule?

If it does, it seems like this is a bug and needs to be changed.

Yes, in regular Stockfish this option only affects the handling of TBs.
The search still enforces the 50-move rule.
I don't think this is a bug but intentional.

So it looks like Moonfish does the job (subject to any GUI interference). I'd forgotten this. It looks like Joerg has not updated Moonfish in the past year, though.

Can you please incorporate this feature in Honey, Mike?!

An important point is that the 50-move rule ruins SF's search even for non-cursed wins that have large DTZ (e.g. conversion in 45 moves), so one might want to turn it off even in a non-TB position.