Arena 3.5 and Endgame Tablebases

I'm having a problem with endgame tablebases when I use my Arena GUI. The engine that I usually use (Stockfish 7 32 bit) does not recognize tablebases and does its own calculations. I have usual situation in the Arena 3.5 GUI with Gaviota 3 men tablebases preinstalled and possibilty to install 4 and 5 men tablebases and specify path in the Options->Configure Tablebases. However, whereas Arena itself recognizes tablebase and shows information in the movelist (like "Ke7 win in 17, Kd7 draw in 18..." etc.), the engine disregards tablebases and starts calculating on its move. I thought it was a question of compatability and tried a couple of other preinstalled engines but the result was the same. Any ideas?

The only tablebases that Stockfish 7 supports are the Syzygy tablebases.

You can get the 3-4-5 piece TB here: https://chess.cygnitec.com/tablebases/

Download both the dtz and wdl.

Once you install the Syzygy TBs, you'll have to tell Stockfish where they're located.

Also ... the Options -> Configure tablebases that you set up is only for Gaviota and only for the GUI.  The engines themselves don't really use that.

In Arena, engines that use Nalimov can be set globally by going to Engines -> Manage - UCI options.  For engines that use Syzygy or Gaviota, you have to do as EscherehcsE says by going Engines -> Engine 1 -> Configure.

Please be relevant, helpful & nice!

Thanks, everybody, you're very useful as usual. I'll try all of those things. Hopefully, I'll be able to answer somebody else's questions too one of these days...

Being relevant, helpful and nice is extremely boring.

I've forgot to ask... Should I just put both dtz and wdl Syzygy tablebases into the same directory and set path to that directory in Stockfish engine configuration. The answer should be "yes" but still I need to double check

...Oops. I've just looked at Syzygy web site. Directories /wdl and /dtz have files with the same names, like 5.7z.001 etc. ????? 

Yep, put them in the same folder. Of course, you'll have to decompress the 7z files first. If you don't have something to do that, you can use the free program 7-Zip:

http://www.7-zip.org/

OK... Sounds right!

...Oops, another problem. I've downloaded a couple of those 5.7z files but I can't open them as Zip archives. I keep getting error messages.???????

We'll use the dtz files as an example. For the 5-piece dtz files, there are 5 parts (5.7z.001, 5.7z.002, 5.7z.003, 5.7z.004, and 5.7z.005). Download all 5 files and put them in the same folder. Using 7-Zip, extract the files from the 5.7z.001 file, and 7-Zip will extract the files from all 5 parts. (If you try to extract files from one of the 2 through 5 parts, it won't work.)

You need to download all 5.  The archive has been split into 5 parts.  If any parts are missing, you'll get an error.

Edit: Sorry E, just saw your answer.

No prob, Crappov. You actually encapsulated it better than I did. :)

@Onegin - When you finish extracting all of the 3-4-5 dtz and wdl files, you should have 290 files, not including the md5sum files.

Do I need to have md5sum files in the Arena folder too and if yes, how do I go around having several md5sum files. By the way, what are these md5sum files?

The md5sum files are just text files that contain the md5 hashes for the Syzygy files. If desired, you can use these md5sum files to verify that none of the Syzygy files got corrupted. If you don't care about that, or don't want to bother verifying the integrity of the files, then you can ignore the md5sum files (delete them, let them be overwritten, it doesn't matter.)

One more important question...What is EGTB probing? Will Stockfish engine do it automatically when I get tablebases files installed  (when I open Arena)?

Now you're getting beyond my knowledge level :) I think this should just happen automatically, as long as you don't disable the probing. I always just accept the default probing depth.

lol What he said.  The short answer is that Stockfish contains probing code and the default settings are fine.  Don't worry about it, just give Stockfish the path.

I don't know the long answer.

I've just unzipped DTZ files. I created a Syzygy folder in the Arena directoryand unzipped those files into that folder but 7-zip program created a subfolder ("3", "4" and "5") for each set. So, now I have three paths: ../Arena/Syzygy/3  ;  ../Arena/Syzygy/4 ;  ../Arena/Syzygy/5

I guess I have to move all files upwards into ../Arena/Syzygy and then delete ../3 , ../4 and ../5 subdirectories. Is that right?

You can pretty much do what you want.  I created a folder called Syzygy and put ALL the Syzygy files in it.  There's no need for them to be split apart and they don't have to go in your Arena folder, either.  

Mine are at C:\Syzygy  I have interfaces besides Arena and they all access the same folder.