Introduced to Horde Chess, a chess variant where Black plays as normal against a White side with 36 pawns, handily available to play online at lichess.org. (White wins by checkmate, Black wins by capturing all the White pieces.)
[Read More]Droidfish the Nihilistic Android chess app
Why a computer chess engine falls back on apparently pointless moves when it's in trouble
I played a bit of chess at school, up in the eaves of the maths department, but hadn’t touched it in years before recently installing the Droidfish app (powered by the Stockfish chess engine) on my phone. Trial and error - and a bit of reading to refresh rusty tactical basics - soon discovered the (still embarrassingly low) percentage strength setting to result in a fair-ish game rather than a wipeout.
But I was puzzled to find that, on occasions when I ended up in a hopefully-winning position in the endgame, Droidfish started making arbitrary, pointless moves rather than trying to make life difficult. (Puzzled, but amused when it means I can effortlessly get a bunch of pawns promoted and checkmate with three queens or the like :smile: )
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