The Chess Mind...

Originally posted by greenpawn34

A couple of examples from Abraham's book 'The Chess Mind.'

(One of them is a mate in 50 moves. It's very easy to solve.)

Which leads onto RHP examples, puzzles and the RHP Hall of doom.


Blog 311

Thanks for the blog, I always enjoy reading them. I gave the mate in 50 position to Crafty to see how well an engine copes. It does produce the correct first move. However, after about 16 hours of computation it misses the point. It works out how to capture black's pawn and capture on f3, but then it just gives f3 blocking its own position at the end of its principle variation. Admittedly its search algorithm twigs the method if one advances the position to the move after Kxf3 - but it can't get it, at least in a sane amount of time, without moving the pieces on the board. It's nice to see a problem I can do (except I saw the text under the board first and that focused my attention on f3) without touching the pieces that a computer couldn't. I'll leave it running and see if it gets the full line in less than a few days.

This is a composition By W.E.Rudolf 1912 from Kmoch's Pawn Power book.
White to play and draw.
The chess engine Rybka evaluates black +6 and would play for white 1) exf6
I played this against the engine following W.E.Rudolf's solution.

W.E.Rudolf ..............................Rybka

1.) Ba4+ .................................. Kxa4 now the engine evaluates black +8
2.) b3+ .....................................Kb5
3.) c4+ .....................................Kc6
4.) d6+......................................Kd7
5.) e6+......................................Kxd8
6.) f5
End of study.Draw ,but the engine now evaluates this Black +13