Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 20:36:56 03/12/05
(This position and story has been posted here before many times with one added little twist regarding the Tasc R30} In 1998, GM Shrivo calculated a mate-15 in a game against Krasenkov that was outstanding on his part. He wrote a nice article, in the November 1998 issue of Chess Life. "Even though the games are completely different (one extremely positional in nature and the other very tctical), they had one thing in common; my difficulties in analysing them with Fritz 5! I entered some of the lines I calculated during the game into Fritz5 and it proved useless!." So far so good ... "Yes, the computers can also see many more simple things than the human GMs do, but can they compete with the best human players in depth? I am not so sure." ok ... and then he moves to this position: [d] 6r1/2rp1kpp/2qQp3/p3Pp1P/1pP2P2/1P2KP2/P5R1/6R1 w - - 0 1; bm Rxg7! "White would have a forced mate in 14 moves! Don't try to put this particular position on Fritz5 or any other program, as it would never suggest 33. Rxg7+! as the stongest move!" As we all know now, Shirov quite simply did not fully appreciate that there were other programs besides Fritz would be able to solve this position. In fact, several programs at the time (1998) found this mate in a few minutes. (Howard Exner was the first to point this out on CC back on Nov 11, 1998. http://chessprogramming.org/cccsearch/ccc.php?art_id=32541) Not only that, the Tasc R30 , programmed and built several years before this game, sees the mate-in-15 (aggressive setting) in just 6 seconds. That is remarkable considering the hardware the R30 is using. It solves it in just 24K nodes. The million dollar question - are there any other dedicated chess computers that predates the Tasc R30 in solving this mate-in-15 in less than a minute? Also, How well do the current crop of dedicated computers do with this problem? R30 regards, Michael ps the problem should be way too easy for a PC program on today's hardware - if not, something may be broken.
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