Eight-piece Tablebase in the Lab

It's been a few years since I posted Seven-piece Tablebase on Lichess (August 2018), featuring a practical endgame tool that anyone can use. A couple of recent articles from Albert Silver of Chessbase indicate that the next tablebase generation is already with us in the research stage:-

• 2022-05-11: 8-piece endgame tablebases - first findings and interview! (chessbase.com)
• 2022-05-16: Cooks and finds with 8-piece tablebases (ditto)

Both articles incorporate a video from Youtube's Chess & Tech channel:-

• 2022-04-25: 8-piece chess endgame tablebase - New Record! (youtube.com)

The video description starts,

The first results of 8-piece chess endgame tablebases are shared in a chat with developer, computer chess enthusiast, and physicist, Marc Bourzutschky.

An earlier, informal paper by Bourzutschky is available at

• 2021-04-21: 8-men Tablebase: first explorations (arves.org; 'Marc Bourzutschky did send this email with his first explorations of the fresh 8-men tablebase.')

Although that page is undated, Google search returns the date I gave for the link. The paper starts,

It has been about fifteen years since Yakov Konoval and Marc Bourzutschky (YKMB) published the first database results for 7-man endgames, and about thirty years since Lewis Stiller’s pioneering work on 6-man endgames.

That means it took about 12 years for the seven-piece tablebase (TB) to become generally available via a web interface. I'm guessing we'll see eight-piece TB tools a lot faster.