Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 12:28:42 04/16/99
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On April 16, 1999 at 14:33:25, KarinsDad wrote: >You are absolutely correct. This is where the difficulty comes in. However, some >years back I came up with my own technique for "long range" opposition. Due to >this technique, I am able to immediately make the proper king move in certain >types of KPP vs. KPP and other types of similar endings. The difficulty here >lies in knowing whether you want to have opposition or not. Once that is >determined, the rest of the moves in these types of endings are almost self >evident (there are special cases as kings get near the edge of the board or near >pawns). I believe (or at least I hope) that similar types of techniques can be >used in KN vs. KR or other endings, the solution (or algorithm) just has to be >found. > >If the possibilities could be broken down into certain subsets of >mini-positions, then it may be possible to determine a solution. However, you >are right that for some of the non-trivial cases, this will take a lot of work >(and of course it was easier to write a program to exhaustively search all of >the possibilities and put that result into a tablebase than it is to dissect >these endings into their basic components). > >To me, this seems to be a complex math problem where the "equations" have not >yet been created due to the fact that the mathematics of chess is totally alien >to any real world phenomenom (knights, castling, en passant and pawn promotion >throw real monkey wrenches into the system), therefore, we have not been trained >to think properly when it comes to "solving the problem". One of the reason I >post messages of this type is to get people to attempt to get beyond their >normal thought processes. > >Finally, some of these cases (especially many of those with knights in them) may >be TOO difficult to resolve via an algorithm. And those might just be better >served with a normal tablebase. It takes little effort and imagination to say that there might be patterns in these endings that would allow them to be solved algorithmically with something that is practical to write. It is not that people have not "gotten beyond their normal thought processes." People have been considering this for at least 20 years. ACC 2, written in 1980, may as well have been titled, "Pissing Around With 4-man Endings", almost half of the book is on this topic. Beal did it with KP vs K, via 3 pages of Fortran. It is clearly the easiest one to do, other than KQ vs K and KR vs K. So here is someone that conceived of this idea and executed it 20 years ago. Maybe it is possible to do it with more complicated endings, but I think that it would be very difficult. That is what would take significant effort and imagination. People tried it with KR vs KN but I think they all ran into walls. I've taken issue about this kind of thing in the past. Some things, the idea is everything and the implementation isn't that big a deal. Other things, the idea is not particularly difficult, but the implementation is a bitch. Deriving algorithms from endgame databases is in this latter category. bruce
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