Friday, February 15, 2008

Mate in 270



People have recently asked the question: "How much stronger is Gothic Vortex Nucelar V than Gothic Vortex Gold IV?"

The diagram above should help answer that question.

Vortex V has the 5-piece Gothic Chess tablebases. These tablebases are probed in RAM as the program searches, they are not just used when you enter into a 5-piece position.

Therefore, Vortex can see that the trades from this position shown above will force black into a pawn-down ending of Queen and Pawn vs. Queen where the side to move (white) will have a mate in 268 moves. The key to the win is 2. Cxh7! and it is the only move to win.

Vortex can announce this win after only 1 second of search (even though the screen shot shows 6 seconds... I didn't capture the first mate announcement quickly enough).

You can imagine there are countless cases as the endgame approaches that the over 300 billion positions can provide a deep insight that will affect the play at the root of the game tree. This makes Vortex play endgames the way God would play them: perfectly, delivering checkmate as quickly as possible, and never making a mistake!

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

New Gothic Chess Playing Site







Thursday, February 7, 2008, at 12 noon Eastern, the new place to play Gothic Chess will be at http://www.Gothic-Chess.com

I just logged on to test the site and took some screen shots, as shown above, so I know it is working. Spread the word, invite your friends, and let's have a big showing this coming Thursday!