CCRL Discussion Board

Hi,


I am looking for suicide chess and also helpmate endgame tablebases or bitbabses.

I know I have found some of the suicide (5 pieces) but I can't remember where. Is anyone aware of such tablebases and could point me to an internet resource. Thanks in advance.


Michael

No reactions, so it seems you are out of luck. I don't have them either. The help-mates would be very easy to do, though. It would just be a matter of skipping the verification step in the normal generation process, and declaring every potentially lost position immediately lost (except for te cycle where you determine the checkmates.) The help-mate end-games would not be very interesting, though, as they would almost all be totally won (with the exception of KBKR, KBKQ and KNKQ for the side with the minor piece). Is there anything specific you want to know here?

The suicide and-games require a much larger modification, due to the mandatory capture.

So far the only generator I have for deviating rules (as opposed to normal rules with fairy pieces) is that for Shatranj, implementing the baring rule.

There is some info at www.icga.org - Game-Specific Info - Losing Chess - on the work done on EGTS for Losing Chess.

John Beasley surveyed what had been done on Losing Chess EGTs, on which 'Angrim' Ben Nye was most recently active.

g

Hi,


Many thanks for the replies. Now that I think of it, as a fairy chess problem fan it would be nice to have tablebases with "all" (yes I know ) kind of fairy chess pieces. What I have found is this one, ok only for 3 pieces with a Janus:

http://abrobecker.free.fr/chess.htm

The software is called "rxr" for those who don't speak French. Any problemists in here ?

Michael

Well, I can do all (and have done very many) pawnless 3, 4 and 5-men with not-too-strange pieces on 8x8. (They must have 8-fold or 4-fold symmetric, position-independent moves, and capture by replacement, not necessarily in the same way as they move.) I can also do 3-men end-games on arbitrary even x even boards upto 16x16. (See, e.g. http://www.chessvariants.org/index/list ... _checkmate )

I never store the tablebases from the RAM buffer they are generated in; I generate them mostly to obtain statistics on the end-game, and it takes only a few minutes to generate a 5-men EGTB. So I just regenerate them as I need them. No sense in filling up my disk with hundreds of GigaBytes that I might never need again.

On my to-do list is still to convert the generator to a WinBoard engine, so that, after the generation phase, you can play against it, having it select its moves from the tablebase.