endgame tablebases

I heard Noam Chomsky once say: "The only thing a chess playing computer can do for you is ruin the game of chess."

Most of these positions are drawn by the 50 move rule, regardless of whether the tablebase can find a win.

In practical terms, trying to play out a Rook and Bishop vs. Rook endgame seems unreasonable.

But as far as I'm aware, that is NOT allowed here?

Only opening databases are allowed. I don't think you're supposed to run to your game DB if you suddenly find yourself in a IQP game to get ideas of how masters handle this?

I believe that books on middlegame that treat IQP positions are allowed to use in turn-based as well.

I think maybe you  and I have different interpretations of the spirit of the rule.

for my it's not a question of whether  the knowledge is "ossified" to or not, but the nature of the knowledge itself.

Opening databases are, by their nature, divergent and for the most part (and perhaps more importantly) built upon human generated analysis.  Most critically, however, they still require the player to ultimately make a decicion what line to play.

Engame databases, on the other hand, represent perfect play as established by pre-run computer analysis and are, by their nature, convergent.  As a result, there's no additional information to be supplied by the player -- it simply becomes a question of transcribing the moves given to you by the tablebase.  This, you'll notice, resembles another form of prohibited assistance here:  Engine use.

hm, I found only 2 games Shirov vs. Smeets, and this is the recent one. Or you meant that both of them tested the endgame(with other opponents of course) :

Actually engines without tablebases might not play perfectly according to tablebase. (Just as they don't play openings perfectly without their Openings Book.)

Well if you can't see the difference then there's little point in continuing the debate.  We'll just have to agree to disagree.  Thankfully, chess.com's current policy is in alignment with the ruleset I prefer.

I saw this one too. Only win on a tournament for poor Shirov.

wow, I didn't expect this many posts!

I also don't agree endgame tablebases should be allowed here in correspondence. While the databases may be fact, they are computer generated and analyzed for correctness. Use of computer analysis isn't allowed here either; not just analysis, as analysis by people of previous games, is allowed.

While I don't completely object to playing computers, my preference is to play people as much as possible. You still get that with opening books, databases, and books on other parts of the game. Sometimes you will get lucky and find the exact position or line from a previous game but you still have to decide how to play it and if what you have is accurate or can be improved on.

If chess.com started allowing tablebase use, I probably would still play here, as I want to get better and I can do that playing a machine or people. I would however, probably find a site that didn't allow it for the majority of my correspondence games.

Any modern endgame book, which is allowed, will be computer analyzed for correctness.

What if the tablebases are on the site, but not used for games

Because offering it on the site would lead to more people using it in their games. At the moment, Chess.com does not offer anything that people can not use during their Correspondance Games, and I assume they would like to keep it that way. Besides, unlike an Opening Database, it would be an exact copy of something that is readily avalible elsewhere online, and such of minimal use to the users.