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Subject: Re: The best "death-save" I ever saw

Author: Martin

Date: 09:31:16 03/02/00

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On March 02, 2000 at 09:41:16, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On March 02, 2000 at 09:09:48, stuart taylor wrote:
>
>>Obviously a bug in stalemate evaluation    S. Taylor
>
>
>There is _no_ stalemate evaluation to have a bug.  This is found by the
>tree search, where there are no legal moves and the side on move is not in
>check...
>
>The problem is that the rook checks will never end, and once the engine sees
>that, a draw by repetition, or by the 50 move rule, or by stalemate, all look
>_exactly_ the same.  Kx was the quickest/easiest way to end the game.
>
>This is rare, but happens.  I have (so far this past week or so) seen this
>happen to crafty playing Chess Tiger, where crafty was 3 pawns up but avoided
>trading rooks and ended up in this trap.  And on another occasion it returned
>the favor by doing the same thing to Tiger.  It is a depth of search issue,
>and not evaluation.  You just have to see deep enough to realize that the
>checks never end,

The "human-approach" is to see that the wK has no squares to move to and this is
an evaluation issue. It's probably not easy to implement into a program (if at
all) but it would probably be a great step forward...

Martin


and then avoid stepping into that position, rather than
>stepping into it and then finding out (later) that the checks never end.



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