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Subject: Re: Never Say "Impossible"

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 04:16:09 05/18/01

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On May 18, 2001 at 04:32:14, Graham Laight wrote:

>On May 18, 2001 at 00:50:30, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On May 17, 2001 at 19:08:15, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>>
>>>On May 17, 2001 at 05:44:03, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>>>You need to write a special program to generate random board even if you want
>>>>only 20 samples because there is no easy way to choose a random position when
>>>>every position gets the same probability without a special program.
>>>>
>>>>Uri
>>>
>>>This seems overly complicated. If you have an encoding method, say, that encodes
>>>all positions into 168 bits, then generate random 168 bit numbers and see what
>>>percent of the corresponding positions are legal.
>>
>>
>>This is actually very difficult.  IE for a position to be legal, you need to
>>prove the following:
>>
>>1.  side on move is not in check;
>>2.  pieces could actually reach the given position (ie if you have 3 pawns on a
>>single file, the opponent must be missing at least two pawns/pieces;
>>3.  the side not on move actually could have made a legal move to get us to the
>>current position.
>>4.  then the side on move actually could have made a legal move to get us to
>>that previous position.
>>
>>IE 3 and 4 are recursive and could be restated:
>>
>>3a.  The position must be reachable from the opening position of the game.
>>That is yet another exponential problem.  Or is that O(1) too.  :)
>
>This isn't necessarily so (though I admit it might be) - because we're talking
>about statistical sampling here.
>
>In view of Bob's constraints 1. and 2. above, my approach would be to generate
>random positions and classify them in one of 3 ways:
>
>a) Obviously legal
>b) Obviously illegal
>c) Not sure
>
>Whether or not this simple approach works depends on the size of c). If it's
>relatively small, there's no problem. If it's relatively large, then it
>threatens the integrity of the exercise.
>
>-g

I agree
I guess that the work about it can be done.

You should generate a program to decide if the position is in class a ,b or c
and after it to try to find manually for positions in class c if they are in
class a or class b.

I guess that in almost all the cases it can be done.
I guess that composing a position when no human can prove that it is illegal and
no human can construct a game to prove that it is legal is not a simple task.

Uri



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