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Subject: Re: Minority attack: a problem even for new programs?

Author: blass uri

Date: 14:06:53 10/17/98

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On October 17, 1998 at 13:25:20, Dirk Frickenschmidt wrote:

>
>Years ago I wondered why only very few of the dedicated computers were able to
>play a so-called minority attack: this is a combined pawns and pieces attack
>against the so-called Karlsbad pawn structure a7b7c6d5, most commonly known from
>the Queen's Gambit Declined, exchange variation (examples of the below), but
>also occuring elsewhere. It often is a useful attacking weapon to push the white
>b-pawn to b5 to threaten to give black a hanging pawn on c6 and play on this and
>the black squares (c5 etc) and the b-file (possibly 6th/7th row)afterwards.
>
>When after a long time I now checked two fundamental test positions,  still
>within the opening, with some newer programs (on MMX200 at tournament time), I
>was surprised to see that not much seems to have changed: many of the programs
>still play nonsense moves like Rac1 or even Rfc1 to get an half-open c-file,
>which is of no big use for them.
>
>My question is, which of the newer programs are able to play minority attacks,
>without getting the usual moves from their opening books (so you will have to
>turn opening books of in my test positions)?
>
>Here are the two positions:
>
>Position 1 [D36] (Instructive sample game: Ftacnik-Ivanchuk, Moscow 1994, with a
>draw but quite interesting possible variations on both sides)
>1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.cxd5 exd5 5.Bg5 c6 6.Qc2 Be7 7.e3 Nbd7 8.Bd3 0-0
>9.Nf3 Re8 10.0-0 Nf8, and which program will play
>a) 11.Rab1 and after g6
>b) 12.b4
>by itself?

Genius3 can find 12.b4 in this position but not 11.Rab1
It prefers a3 and after a longer time Rac1

Uri





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