Author: Pekka Karjalainen
Date: 07:52:54 10/10/00
Hi folks, there were some postings some time ago by Bruce Moreland, I believe, about tablebases for chess on the 6x6 board. That seemed quite interesting actually and I started to wonder: Could we solve 6x6 chess? If not, how about an even smaller variant? You can find several actual small chessvariants from this URL: http://www.chessvariants.com . Basically you can make them up yourself by taking a smaller board (any size from 3x1 upwards is possible). Just set the starting position as you please and call it <foo>chess. The smallest ones are obviously trivial and can be solved even on the back of an envelope. You might want to remove the castling rule and double pawn moves, and even treat stalemate as a win to avoid total drawishness. But this is not what I am after really. I was thinking that would it be interesting to try to solve these? Could we get a program that would search all the way from a starting position to its (smaller NB) tablebases? One might even get a little feeling about the actual (and huge) computing resources that would be needed to solve standard chess. If 5x5 takes this much effort and 6x6 takes that much then 8x8 takes SO much (exponentially more of course). What would a solution to a 5x5 chess variant really look like? As I am not much of a chess programmer I do not want to take on this challenge myself. But if it interests anyone at all, maybe it was worth mentioning. Comments? Pekka K.
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