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Subject: another endgame test position

Author: martin fierz

Date: 23:36:48 08/28/04

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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

kurt made the (unfortunately valid) point that my original position allows black
to win without exchanging queens. so i've modified it to exclude that
possibility.

the point i wanted to make is that human experts don't treat an exchange into a
pawn ending as "yet another variation", instead they check such exchanges much
more carefully. which is why i see this Q-exchange variation immediately, and an
engine which either
1) doesn't check trades into pawn endings properly or
2) lacks knowledge about the square / the floating square
will have trouble coming up with the line i gave. which also means it would have
trouble in my next test position, which is a simple modification (i removed the
black pawn on f3 - if 6-piece tablebases with 4 pawns were available, one could
add another white pawn on a2/b2/b3 for engine confusion without changing the
result):

[D] 8/6kp/8/3p4/1P4q1/P7/5K2/4Q3 b - - 0 57

black still wins with the Q-exchange, and he wins very easily. my fritz 7 on a
P4 1.4GHz is showing ...Qc4 (0.00)after 6 minutes (can anybody check out fritz
8?).

so again: which engine sees this in a reasonable amount of time? to me it is
just very astonishing that a top engine like fritz can't handle this... i'm used
to analyze my games with fritz, and usually it finds errors i make, and not vice
versa :-)

cheers
  martin



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