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Subject: Re: Help with strange tablebase output - Crafty-18.6 & Fritz6

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 13:18:15 03/16/01

Go up one level in this thread


On March 16, 2001 at 16:09:53, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On March 16, 2001 at 16:02:20, John Hatcher wrote:
>
>>Here is a position arising from Rueben Fine's "Basic Chess Endings", No. 309b -
>>
>>r7/4P1k1/3K4/8/8/8/8/5R2 w
>>
>>White wins after 1. Ra1.  This solution was found instantly (of course) by both
>>Wcrafty-18.6 (using Winboard) and Fritz6, both using the same 5-piece Nalimov
>>tablebases.
>>
>>But now it gets strange.  What if White temporizes first with 1. Rg1+  Kf7,
>>arising at this position:
>>
>>r7/4Pk2/3K4/8/8/8/8/6R1 w
>>
>>Wcrafty-18.6 instantly finds the win after 2. Rf1+  Kg7 (not 2. ...Ke8? 3. Rf8#)
>>3. Ra1, transposing into the first position.  However, Fritz6 doesn't see the
>>win!?  It's engine output reads:
[...]
>>How can Fritz6 see the win in the first position and not see it in the second?
>>The most obvious move, 2. Rf1+, isn't even listed in the engine output!?
>>
>>What's going on here?  Can anyone duplicate this strange output?
>
>That is very odd.  Every engine I tested (which knows about tablebase files)
>found it immediately.
>
>I have the 5 men files.  Maybe Fritz has only the 4 men files available?

I don't think, this is the reason. For the above positions current versions of
Yace disable access to 5-men TBs with my set of TBs (KRPKR without any promotion
cases). Nevertheless the right move is found instantly with big score.

First, I would have thought, that missing promotion cases may be a problem for
Fritz, but in both positions, the correct move is not a promotion move, and so
this seems not a logical explaination. These position would not suffer (yet)
from the well-known problem with the missing promotion cases.

-- Dieter




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