Endgame Tablebases-What are they? I've been reading and enjoying the site immensely.
What is the &quot;Endgame Tablebase&quot;?  I see it referenced frequently.
Endgame tablebases are essentially databases containing known endgame positions that have been “solved”, so to speak. That is, every position in an endgame tablebase will have a corresponding result which will either be a win for white, a win for black, or a draw (assuming perfect play). They are used by chess engines because it is much more efficient for the computer to look up an endgame position in a database to get the result of the endgame rather than exhausting all the possible variations to determine the result.