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Subject: Re: Here's a position I call "Somebody's in trouble" -- Your prog says what?

Author: Miguel A. Ballicora

Date: 07:45:04 02/07/02

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On February 07, 2002 at 05:20:03, Uri Blass wrote:

>On February 07, 2002 at 04:37:07, Scott Gasch wrote:
>
>>I don't understand; it's a legal chess position -- any program should be able to
>>handle it...
>
>You are wrong

In a computer program (chess or whatever), crashing is not an acceptable
behavior. It might be "understandable", but you cannot be happy about it.
If you decide to have a design that does not accept 9 queens, the program should
not accept the FEN and warn the user in the first place.

Regards,
Miguel



>
>There are programs that were not build to analyze legal positions but to play
>games.
>
>A program can safely assume that the number of queens of one side is at most 8
>because it is going to never see a position when one side has 9 queens in it's
>search.
>
>Even if the opponent is very weak the program may mate a lot before it gets 9
>queens on the board.
>
>I doubt if it is possible to convince the program to promote all it's pawns
>because it is usually going to find a faster mate without promoting most of the
>pawns.
>
>It also seems safe to assume that there
>are no more than 8 rooks and no more than 8 bishops or knights if the target is
>only to play games and not to analyze.
>
>Uri



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