Yakov Konoval
Yakov Konoval,
a Russian chess player and programmer from Orenburg, born 1955. From 1968 until 1974, Yakov Konova studied at Botvinnik's chess school [1]. In 1982 Yakov became a programmer and soon started to combine chess and programming. In 1986-1987 he wrote a program for solving chess problems - one of the fastest for that period, and later worked on Retrograde Analysis for Endgame Tablebases.
7-man EGTBs
In 2005 Yakov Konoval started to collaborate with Marc Bourzutschky on constructing 7-man EGTBs. Yakov wrote the generator and Marc a verification program and some utilities for extracting the data. Marc also does the generation of 7-man EGTB on his home computers.
Quote by Guy Haworth from CCRL Discussion Board Endgame Tablebases, May 17, 2007 [2]. Yakov Konoval has a new super-fast code that computes 7-man EGTs to the DTC(onversion) metric. Marc Bourzutschky has production-run this code to create several P-less endgames' EGTs and a few P-ful ones too. I think that further development of the code, to create P-ful endgames' EGT to the DTZ metric, P-slice by P-slice, is on the back-burner at the moment, but maybe there's some more production-running going on.
EGTB records
In October 2005, Yakov Konoval and Marc Bourzutschky announced that a position in the ending of a KRRNkrr requires 290 moves to convert to a simpler winning endgame [3]. The old record was 243 moves from a position in a rook and knight versus two knights endgame, discovered by Lewis Stiller in 1991 [4].
In March 2006 the wizards of 7-men endgames, Marc Bourzutschky and Yakov Konoval found a 330 moves win in KQBNkqb [5] and in May 2006 a 517 moves win in KQNkrbn [6] [7].
External Links
- Endgame databases by Emil Vlasák
- Open Chess Diary 311. 31 March 2006: White plays and wins in 330 moves by Tim Krabbé
- Open Chess Diary 316. 26 May 2006: A 517-move win by Tim Krabbé
References
- ↑ Mikhail Botvinnik - Influence on the game from Wikipedia
- ↑ Current status of 7-men tablebases? by ZeroOne, CCRL Discussion Board Endgame Tablebases, May 07, 2007
- ↑ Subject: KRRNKRR win in 290: a new record by Marc Bourzutschky, CCC, October 16, 2005
- ↑ Chess endgame from Wikipedia
- ↑ 311. 31 March 2006: White plays and wins in 330 moves by Tim Krabbé
- ↑ OPEN CHESS DIARY 316. 26 May 2006: A 517-move win by Tim Krabbé
- ↑ Bernard W. Kobes (2008). The Apriori in Chess. pdf preprint (draft)
