Yakov Konoval

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Yakov Konoval, a Russian chess player and programmer from Orenburg, born 1955. From 1968 until 1974, Yakov Konova studied at Botvinnik's chess school. 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. 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. The old record was 243 moves from a position in a rook and knight versus two knights endgame, discovered by Lewis Stiller in 1991.

In March 2006 the wizards of 7-men endgames, Marc Bourzutschky and Yakov Konoval found a 330 moves win in KQBNkqb and in May 2006 a 517 moves win in KQNkrbn.

=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= Up one level