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Subject: Re: 256 mate problems

Author: Heiner Marxen

Date: 06:50:27 07/23/01

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On July 23, 2001 at 02:25:50, Uri Blass wrote:

>On July 22, 2001 at 22:44:46, Heiner Marxen wrote:
>
>>On July 21, 2001 at 15:02:43, Uri Blass wrote:
>>
>>4k3/8/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQ - acn 718366; acs 8; bm e4; ce 32756; dm 6;
>>pv e4 Kf8 Qg4 Ke8 Qg7 Kd8 Bb5 Kc8 Bc6 Kd8 Qd7#;
>
>Here chest is faster than chessmaster in finding the shortest mate.

:-)

>chessmaster6000 cannot see mate in 6 even after some minutes because of null
>move pruning unless I asked it to search for mate in 6.
>
>The problematic line from chessmaster's point of view is:
>1.e4 Kd7 2.Qg4+ Kc7 3.Qg7+ Kc6 4.d4 Kb6 5.Qd7 when black is in zunzwang.
>
>Usually chessmaster is faster than chest in finding the shortest mate but it
>does not know that the mate that it found is the shortest mate.

Yes, and this is what makes Chest slow, most of the time: proving that all
those shorter mates do not exist.

>I guess that the times of chest in every problem is for finding all the
>solutions and in this case chessmaster has a clear advantage because it is happy
>with finding 1 solution.

Normally (for Chest that is with composed chess problems with just one
solution) this is not a big thing.  The average solution time would reduced
by a factor of 2, or even less, since the non-solution moves often are
significantly faster to compute.

Here, where we have 2 or sometimes even 5 solution moves, it could be a
factor of 4.  That would change the times significantly.
OTOH, it is nice to know all solutions as a reference point.

>Chessmaster results in finding the shortest mate in the same problems in
>comparison to chest:
>
>-,  8
>4,  190
>2,  180
>2,  129
>13, 141
>4,  157
>17, 128
>6,  182
>2,  182
>52, 250
>25, 203
>108,278
>125,178
>-  ,186
>24 ,216
>6,  291
>38, 197
>87, 179
>5,  230
>25, 213
>19, 200
>103,357
>71 ,324

Thanks for the info!
That doesn't look bad for Chest.  What CPU/memory did you use for Chessmaster?


>Chessmaster also found mate in 8 in all the other problems that were posted
>except one
>
>[D]4k3/pp2p3/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQ - 0 1

That one is still busy computing :-)

Regards,
Heiner



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