Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 10:14:04 09/21/99
Go up one level in this thread
On September 20, 1999 at 20:00:07, James Robertson wrote: >On September 20, 1999 at 19:05:56, Jeremiah Penery wrote: > >>On September 20, 1999 at 16:15:46, James Robertson wrote: >> >>>My program only generates Queen and Knight promotions, as I have never seen a >>>position where a Bishop/Rook promotion was any good.... I have run across a few >>>nice Knight promotion positions, though. >> >>There are some positions where promoting to a Rook is the only winning move, as >>a Queen promotion would stalemate, and a Knight wouldn't be enough to be able to >>mate the opponent with. Unfortunately, I don't have any examples. :( >>In any case, such positions are VERY rare. >> >>Jeremiah > >I am aware of many positions like this, but I have yet to actually see one in a >game. That is what I meant by my comment. > >James Crafty lost a game a few years ago... simple KNN vs KP ending, where it had the pawn. At a critical juncture, it had to play c8=N+ to avoid getting mated. There was a bit of confusion between crafty and xboard (at the time) as to the case of the promotion character. I had it wrong, and ICC ignored it and assumed queen. And Crafty got mated instantly. So I have seen at _least_ one game where underpromoting to a N saved the draw, and promoting to _any_ other piece was an instant loss. I have seen a rare game or two where under-promoting to a rook was necessary to avoid a stalemate as well. However, crafty has only played 1.2 zillion games so even though I have them in this huge pgn database, finding them would be painful... I saw a game at the Albuquerque ACM event where Lachex also didn't do under- promotions... and it lost a game because it was winning, thought the opponent would promote to a queen and give it the tempo to force mate. The opponent under-promoted to a N and mated him in a couple of moves instead. This was around 1992, but was at the ACM conference in New Mexico for sure... Burt Wendroff was not real happy. :)
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.