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Falcon Chess. Game on an 8x10 board with a new piece: The Falcon. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Jul 3, 2008 10:25 AM UTC:

George Duke:
| Right, that paragraph could be improved, let's see. That was written 
| in late 1996, when copyright mailed in USA, and not revised for the 
| CVP 2000 article. If one King and Falcon stand on own back rank, 
| and other King at its bank rank, with no other pieces on board, no 
| checkmate is possible with good play.

I did some more tests using a converted Joker80 engine, and it seems that on a 10x8 board this statement is plain wrong. Joker has no difficulty at all in checkmating a bare King with King + Falcon, even if they all start from their own backrank (or even if the bare King can start in the center). Even if I let the defending side search 100x longer, making it search ~10 ply deeper, so that it sees the mate coming long before the winning side does, and would avoid it if possible.

David Paulowich:
| Falcon Chess has the opposite problem: I have not seen anyone state 
| that King and Falcon can force a lone King into a corner. 

OK, so I am the first then. ;-) Even an engine with a comparatively shallow search has no problems driving a bare King into a corner with King + Falcon, as long as it knows that it is bad for a bare King to be closer to a corner. Even if the defending side enormously outsearches it. This applies to 8x8 boards (where there is ironclad proof through an end-game tablebase) as well as 10x8 (where it is based on time-odds play testing).

This page really need thorough revision. Apart from poor presentation, some of the statements in it are just plain false, or very unlikely to be true at least...