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Subject: Re: To Bob, probably Crafty has an interesting problem

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 14:23:56 06/09/01

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On June 09, 2001 at 14:38:04, Joachim Heuser wrote:

>On June 09, 2001 at 11:32:09, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On June 09, 2001 at 04:37:32, Joachim Heuser wrote:
>>
>>>On June 08, 2001 at 22:11:56, Jim Monaghan wrote:
>>>
>
>>>I am quite sure that nearly every position from KBBKN is won for the two
>>>bishops.
>>
>>Sorry, but you are quite wrong.  Go to my ftp site, cd to the TB/tbs
>>directory, and download kbbkn*tbs and take a look.  More draws than
>>wins.
>>
>
>What i meant was: from nearly every position, where the two bishops are on
>different colours and the knight cannot capture one of those bishops in the next
>move, the two bishops can force mate or winning the knight, though this may take
>more than 50 moves.
>I set up some rather ugly positions with the two bishops not working together
>and it took ~40-50 moves (according to cb-tablebases) to capture the knight.
>
>In the book german book from Kishon: "Schachcomputer" (1993), the author claims
>that the machine "Alice" analysed this endgame to be always won (he doesn't
>state when this analysis took place). There was a position, too, which should
>take longest to capture the knight (66 moves):
>K7/8/7B/8/8/5k2/6n1/7B w - - 0 1
>wKa8,Bh1,h6/bKf3,Ng2
>
>I wasn't able to create a drawn position which matches the pattern mentioned
>above.


I haven't tried this, but the simple way to estimate how many wins vs draws
there are in KBB vs KN is a Monte Carlo approach.  Generate quite a few random
positions with bishops on opposite colors, and probe to see if it is won or
drawn.  A few thousand should give an accurate percentage of what percentage
is drawn vs won...




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