Author: Heiner Marxen
Date: 14:39:02 11/15/98
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On November 14, 1998 at 10:37:55, Hans Havermann wrote: >Valentin Albillo, more than a year ago, posted his "unsolved" >3qk3/8/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQ - (Test #91: ><http://www.multimania.com/albillo/ajedre9a.htm>). Computationally intensive, >Albillo conjectured "it's a mate in 12". A number of chess engines had a go at >it, but the attempts are old and seem dated. I wonder if this problem has since >been solved. > >I thought I should let MacChess (5.0b3) try this on my 300 MHz G3. After 56 >hours, toward the end of 13-ply, MacChess came up with: > > 1. e4 Qd4 > 2. Bb5+ Ke7 > 3. Qg4 Qe5 > 4. Qd7+ Kf8 > 5. d3 Qh5 After 4. Qd7+ there are just two legal moves, Kf8 and Kf6. Much to my own surprise my problem solving program already found solutions for mate in 7 in both cases. This would amount to a mate in 11, provided the moves before 4. ...Kf8/Kf6 are already optimal (which I don't know). After 4. ... Kf8, 5. d3 is the unique key starting a mate in 7, while after 4. ... Kf6, the following three moves all are keys for a mate in 7: 5. d3, 5. b3 and 5. Nc3. Quite an interesting problem :-) But since both those mate in 7 did eat up more than an hour of CPU time, the original problem is still too large for my program. :-(
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