Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 16:04:25 10/03/05
Go up one level in this thread
On October 03, 2005 at 18:55:21, Chris Conkie wrote: >If I may just say finally through you Graham, to George.... > >The positions given in the following link are entirely legal. > >[d] K7/1P6/2NR4/2QRQ3/1QpppQ2/2pkp3/1QpbpQ2/2Q1Q3 w - - 0 1 > >http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?453349 > >I know what I see. I know it matters. > >That is all I have to say. > >Chris Those positions are exceedingly unlikely to occur in a real game. For all practical purposes, these positions do not matter at all for game PLAYING. For persons interested in problem solving, this sort of position does have meaning and importance. Since Zappa [for instance] does not support these, I suggest the following course of action: 1. Send a feature request to Anthony Cozzie, asking for the ability to process highly volatile puzzle positions and provide a list of the sort of positions which reproduce the problem 2. Use something else that does support those sorts of positions when you want to analyze positions of this sort. I think that it is a good thing for every chess engine to support every legal position. But if an author chooses (for instance) to NEVER under promote and loses games because of it, that's his business. For positions with no kings on the board -- that's a USER error (bad input). NOT a programmer error. Now, if the program has smarts to diagnose illegal positions, that's a bonus and also a good thing. And if it has even more smarts to recognize impossible positions, that's even better: [D]4k3/P5pp/P5pp/P6p/P6p/PP5p/PP5p/4K3 w - - c0 "Can't possibly happen."; In the ase of open source programs, you can add in additional error checking any time you like. I think you will find that (for instance) movei is very good at figuring out what sort of positions ought to be allowed. As far as handling 9 queen mobility situations, I am not sure which is best. Probably, if you are looking for checkmate, chest will be best at that sort of thing. And if you put 30 queens on the board, I guess that all bets are off.
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