🕸💡📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Thu, Jul 26, 2018 02:21 AM UTC:
I left Zillions-of-Games running again, this time with a Knight, a Vao, and a King for White against a lone black King. I then forgot about it until I was ready to turn the computer off for the night. I just stopped it on turn #1986. So, clearly, a Knight and a Vao are not sufficient mating material.
I based my original judgments on whether I could conceive of checkmates that used the pieces in question. For example, if the Black King were on a12, the White Vao was on the diagonal for that space, say at h6, and the White Knight moved to c10, that would be checkmate. The difficulty is in getting the lone King to stay in a corner where it can be easily checkmated in this way. I'll have to run more trials with Zillions-of-Games to see what combinations of material can actually force checkmate.
I left Zillions-of-Games running again, this time with a Knight, a Vao, and a King for White against a lone black King. I then forgot about it until I was ready to turn the computer off for the night. I just stopped it on turn #1986. So, clearly, a Knight and a Vao are not sufficient mating material.
I based my original judgments on whether I could conceive of checkmates that used the pieces in question. For example, if the Black King were on a12, the White Vao was on the diagonal for that space, say at h6, and the White Knight moved to c10, that would be checkmate. The difficulty is in getting the lone King to stay in a corner where it can be easily checkmated in this way. I'll have to run more trials with Zillions-of-Games to see what combinations of material can actually force checkmate.