Static recognition of potential wins in KNNKB and KNNKN

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 tobe 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). © 2004 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.