Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: an endgame test position

Author: martin fierz

Date: 23:09:11 08/28/04

Go up one level in this thread


On August 29, 2004 at 01:45:53, Kurt Utzinger wrote:

>On August 28, 2004 at 18:40:43, martin fierz wrote:
>
>>aloha!
>>
>>after all the cloning talk, here's something to test your favorite engine with:
>>i played a weakish IM today and got the following position after 56...Qg6+
>>57.Kf2:
>>
>>[D] 8/6kp/8/3p4/1P4q1/P4p2/5K2/4Q3 b - - 0 57
>>
>>it took me a couple of seconds to see that after 57...Qh4+ 58. Kf1 Qxe1+ 59.
>>Kxe1 Kf6 black is completely winning due to the floating square (it's nice to
>>see that reading dvoretzky is some good!) and so i played that and won :-)
>>
>>interestingly, when i entered this game in chessbase running fritz7 in the
>>background, fritz didn't seem to see this at all within a minute or so. so
>>question to all: how long does your favorite engine need to see the line ...Qh4+
>>Kf1 Qxe1+ with a HUGE plus score (i.e. +9 or so - that is what my assessment of
>>the position was after a couple of seconds...)?
>>
>>i don't want to claim that this is the only win, but it is by far the easiest
>>one, and fritz 7 misses it completely.
>>
>>cheers
>>  martin
>
>
>      Hi Martin
>      A most interesting position showing the difference
>      of thinking between human and machine. You "know"
>      that the exchange of queens is an easy win, the
>      engines have no idea.

hi kurt,

yes and no. for example, crafty knows something about split vs connected passers
and unlike hiarcs in its analysis you posted below would play 60...Qe4+ and
exchange queens for a winning pawn endgame. crafty also first gave a line with
Q-exchange which it wrongly evaluated as winning for black, when in fact it was
a win for white. my fritz 7 seems to be more on the agnostic side, even after
you enter the pawn ending it doesn't give high scores for a couple of seconds up
to ply 17 or something like that.
so this position shows a bit whether an engine has this type of pawn-endgame
transition knowledge or not, it also shows what the engine does about
transitions to pawn endings. this transition has been a subject here a couple of
times; some engines are better at it than others (i would very much like to see
what yace makes of this - dieter?)


>      But there is one important
>      thing to consider here: for computers 57...Qg2
>      wins too and this line may be the reason that
>      the engines can't find the more human like 57...Qh4
>      58.Kf2 Qxe1 within reasonable time.

that is probably true, but it would be easy to modify this position so that only
the Q-exchange wins - then only engines which manage such transitions would
solve it.

for the record, my own program (which has some code to help it for such
transitions) fails miserably on this test of course!

cheers
  martin



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.