Author: Robert Henry Durrett
Date: 09:17:28 06/19/02
Suppose you were an endgame aficionado or you had a good friend who was and you wanted to help him/her by providing a first-class endgame engine. What would you provide? What are your thoughts on this? Here are some thoughts of mine: Endgames are different from the middlegame in one important way. There is a lot of accumulated knowledge about endgames. Much of this has been expressed in "rules." For example, if you have an endgame with a rook and a passed pawn, the rule is to put your rook behind the passed pawn. Another example, in king and pawn endgames, is to use the opposition. The list goes on and on. Of course, all rules have exceptions, so concrete analysis is still required. I would expect an endgame engine to evaluate positions for TYPE often, especially whenever an exchange takes place. The set of applicable "rules" are generally quite different for different types of endgames. Searches strategies might also be optimized for each different TYPE of endgame. Incidentally, an "endgame engine" could be packaged as a subprogram of a larger "complete game" chess engine. Whenever the game moved into the endgame phase, the endgame subprogram would be kicked in and the middlegame subprogram turned OFF. Just a few thoughts. Bob D.
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