Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 15:55:50 11/16/02
There is an old 1953 book, which many here have probably read, which has twenty three historically significant king attacks involving sacrifice of material against the enemy castled king. Some say that chess masters MUST know these. At the absolute minimum, I would expect any good chess engine "worth it's salt" to be able to solve them quickly. i.e. "The Art of Checkmate" by Renaud & Kahn. Available from Dover. Since the publication of that book, there have been quite a few chess books written about attack, sacrifice, and similar ideas. I have most of them and am sure that many here do too. Again, stating facts everybody here already knows, the availability of the big database programs, CB8 for example, make it possible to search for new games having position fragments such as the one in Renaud & Kahn's book. It would be easy, although time consuming, to produce a new version of that old book but using new games and new king attack themes. Study collections from attacking masters, like Bobby Fischer, would be a good start. Perhaps those who come up with king attack test positions for chess engines have already done that. I don't know. King defense is the other side of the same coin. It would seem to me that a chess programmer would first teach his/her engine to attack and then teach the engine to defend against those same attacks. Generally, the defender must "see it coming before it's too late." Similarly, the attacker must know how to set the conditions for an attack and build up the position to make success more likely. My gut feel is this is NOT a horizon problem. The engine should be able to see the opportunities to build an attack without necessarily seeing the checkmate at the end. In fact, my intuition is telling me that the engine should not only be able to recognize positional weaknesses, but to create them as well. Similarly in defense. Notice that this is talking about pattern recognition. Knowledge of patterns. To me, attack and defense go hand in hand. If I get to the point of teaching my TBD chess engine to attack and defend, I will start with Renaud & Kahn's book. Bob D.
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