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Subject: Re: Why can't Fritz count?

Author: blass uri

Date: 01:35:57 10/08/98

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On October 08, 1998 at 04:28:13, Kai Lübke wrote:

>On October 08, 1998 at 02:03:56, blass uri wrote:
>
>>
>>On October 07, 1998 at 23:33:53, James T. Walker wrote:
>>
>>>I gave Fritz 5.16 a position /p4K/P////k// W.  I think that I have that figured
>>>out right.  Anyway, Fritz announces #14 after about 16 sec.  But when you go
>>>through the moves it announces #13 twice, #10 twice,#8 followed by #9 etc.  It
>>>jumps from #6 to #4 no matter what move I make in that position.  After that it
>>>counts on down to mate properly.  It ends up with about a mate in 17.  What
>>>causes this phenom ?  Crafty with the same position announces #17 on the first
>>>move then while pondering it finds mate in 15.  After that it counts down by one
>>>to mate.  That seems fairly normal.
>>>Jim
>>
>>Fritz never knew to count
>>It was designed to play chess and not to count the number of moves to mate
>>
>>I think that this is because of hash tables
>>Maybe fritz found that some position leads to mate and remember it in the hash
>>tables as mate without the number of moves
>>
>>After it go to the same position again in the search it evaluates it as
>>checkmate without number of moves and this is the reason that it cannot count
>
>The "mate in 8, then on the next move mate in 9" stuff is something you often
>see in Fritz engines (Hiarcs and Junior have the same problems sometimes).
>Crafty has a special code that assures that a "mate in N" is never followed by
>a "mate in N+k" where k>=0.
>I'm just waiting for someone to find a position where Fritz will not be able to
>mate because of this... :-)
>
>---
>Shep

The main problem with fritz is that often the mate in N is only an illusion of
fritz.

It is a bad idea to use a special code for fritz telling it to look after mate
in N only for mate in N-1 or less before solving this problem because the result
may be: no mate found.

Uri



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