Abstract
The fact that the strong side cannot enforce a win in KNNK makes many chess players (both humans and computers) prematurely regard KNNKB and KNNKN to be trivially drawn too. This is not true, however, because there are several tricky mate themes in KNNKB and KNNKN which occur more frequently and require more complicated handling than common wisdom thinks. The text analyzes the mate themes and derives rules from them which allow for the static recognition of potential wins in KNNKB and KNNKN without further lookahead by search. Although endgame databases achieve the same goal, they are normally far less efficient at doing so because of their additional I/O and memory requirements (even when compressed).
This work originally started back in the mid-1990s while the author still was a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Computer Science, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and then continued throughout his stay as a postdoctoral fellow at the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science, USA, from 1999 to 2001.
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Heinz, E.A. (2004). Static Recognition of Potential Wins in KNNKB and KNNKN. In: Van Den Herik, H.J., Iida, H., Heinz, E.A. (eds) Advances in Computer Games. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 135. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35706-5_4
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