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H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Jan 3, 2018 12:01 PM UTC:

An extra man both means that there are many more material combiations, and that each combiation takes far more storage and time (like a factor 64 or 32 times as much). If 7 men took half a year, 8 men will take about half a century.

A reason to do it again would be ownership; the 7-men Lomonov EGT are a commercial enterprise, and you have to pay for the use of it. The type of EGT could also be an issue; I don't know whether Lomonosov is DTM or DTZ50, but whatever it is, one could want to have the opposite type.

Note that the 7-men EGT are good for looking up positions from the actual game, but are virtually useless for guiding the search (which would need probing of about a million times as many positions). Their size is so large that current storage media on anything but a super-computer cannot hold them. So access must be through the internet, which is thousands of times too slow to be of any use. EGT up to 6-men can still be stored on a typical had disk (or better yet, a solid-state replacement), and thus be accessed in reasonable time, although this still causes significant slowdown of the search.

Note that use of 5-men EGT by Chess engines typically improved their play by about 0 Elo. For 6-men there seems to be a small positive effect, like 10-20 Elo. This is most likely due to the fact that the current top engines have been developed while 6-men EGT were already available, and thus have been designed to be fully dependent on them, andrather clueless in their absense. Engines are typically developed only for Elo, and the the rating lists test them in games that are adjudicated as soon as the 5- or 6-men stage is reached. So who cares if their engine is not able to win KQK or KRK, when they get the point for free by adjudication anyway?


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