Kenneth W. Regan's Chess Page

 

Note for June 2014 Chess Life readers, with other links.

"Fidelity" Chess Research Site

Letter and Report (PDF file), addressed to the Association of Chess Professionals in regard to the performance by Borislav Ivanov at the 2012 Zadar Open. Details in the report exemplify statements made in the 1/13/13 New York Times chess column, which links here.

Garry Kasparov Versus the Rest of the World.

Have not had time for this, because the time I could afford to allocate for my chess hobby has been interfered with by ... my chess hobby!

World Team Endgame Strategy Explained

By Dr. Kenneth W. Regan ("K.W.ReganIM2405" on BBS). For all chess players to read, enjoy, and understand.




Tests of Topalov's team's cheating claims during the 2006 World Championship Title Re-Unification Match in Elista, Kalmykia, Russia, 9/23/06--10/13/06. Also general theory for testing fidelity of decision-making to an agent's recommendations, which is a general AI/machine-learning issue.

Computer Chess Topics, including in-situ testing of pseudorandom generators used for subset-sum (Zobrist) hashing.




Endgame Studies and other chess problems.

Note on April 2012 Chess Life, p42: The move 1.a4? is not a dual---Black provably draws the Q+P ending after 1...g1=Q+. This was an edit-version error.

An "Engine Study", meaning one designed to require a fast computer program (with Nalimov EGTs, even) for most enjoyable solving! Using a computer is not considered cheating here---but of course, you have to be both "insane" and lucky to actually compose one of these! A 6-man EGT of KQkbnp at the Knowledge4IT Free EGT Server, supplied the final "luck", with a beautiful quiet move and symmetrical position in the (not unique) main EGT line.

PGN file of Adams-Polgar K+P endgame, with my analysis completely refuting GM Mihail Marin's otherwise-wonderful article for ChessBase here. Version with full analysis. The surprising idea is that in a blocked position, allowing an outside passed pawn is not suicide even though engines think it is. I have modified Adams-Polgar into a more extreme example of this theme, whereby an evaluation over 5 pawns from Deep Fritz 10 at very high depth (above 35) is still a draw, which I posted on the Rybka forums here.

PGN file analyzing the drama-filled King and Pawn ending from the key last-round game Mamedyarov-Sokolov from Essent 2006. A hold by Black would have given clear first to Judit Polgar in her comeback from maternity! It has two situations with delicious irony and instructive comments for general playing levels. PGN files are jumbles when read as text, but can be decoded and viewed by most chess programs, including the freeware "Scid" (see Wikipedia entry and SourceForge page), and (the freeware version of) ChessBase. Actually, the free program ChessPad for Windows from WML Software (not to be confused with a shareware $25 program ChessPad for Palm Pilot at http://www.solutionsinhand.com/ChessPad/ChessPad.htm) gives an especially pleasing effect. It shows just what you should see to make it a puzzle or study, and doesn't care that I put Text-After-Move when on other viewers I should have used Text-Before-Move and vice-versa.

Also, with SCID you should realize that if you step into a variation, you can only step out back to the main line by clicking a down-arrow, after clicking left-arrow to get back to the start-of-line for the variation.