There is no sequence of legal moves leading to either player being checkmated, even if the players cooperate in trying to find such a sequence.
Note, however, that the bishop can be captured. But if black captures it, he stalemates white. So this attempt to refute the deadness of the position does not work.
Technically, then, the bishop cannot be captured, because the position is already dead, so the game is already over. (Once again, a super-strict interpretation of 14D leads to this conclusion.)
So let’s call the bishop semi-capturable. It could be captured, if it weren’t for that pesky rule 14D.
Contest: Find a dead position with N semi-capturable pieces. The winning entry is the one with the largest value of N.
In the above diagram, N=1.
Your position must be legal, meaning that it can be arrived at with a sequence of legal moves from the starting position.
Um, when the flag falls in a dead position, the game is drawn. In fact, once a dead position is reached, the game is automatically and immediately drawn. It makes no difference what happens after that.
And that requires only an ordinary adherence to 14D, not a fanatical and super-literal one.
Attempts to improve this position seem futile. If one adds a (promoted) W bishop on b1, then the stalemate is lifted and all sorts of helpmates involving …Kxf1 and …Kxe2 become possible. If promoted pieces are not allowed in the original position, my guess is that N=1 is the largest value. (And I hope that you will now prove me spectacularly wrong!)
Hmm, put a Black bishop on f2 and the WK on h1. Black to play releases the stalemate with 1…Bg1. Does this count as a N=2 position? (White’s first move is compulsory.)
If the previous example is allowed, then N=8 is trivial: add six more Black dark-square bishops. They are capturable through 1…Be1-f2+ 2.Kg1-h1 Bf2-g1 3.Kh1xg1. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I came up with this thinking it was upped to 13 and then I realized all of the black bishops will never actually be capturable and thus it is only 7.
Simply adding even one white light-squared bishop (on e8 for example) to Bill’s construction would allow:
Kxh1 Bd2, Bf7 Ke1, Be8 Kxf1, Bf7 Kxe2, Be8 Kf2, Bf7 e2, Be8 e1=R#.
There is, of course, this one, but a mate is actually possible so that doesn’t work.
Jeff, I was wondering when you’d jump into this thread. That last one looks valid to me, but somehow it wasn’t what I was (subconsciously) expecting. Now there is too much illusory freedom.
Nevertheless, I’ll have to declare it the winner – unless somebody comes up with 19, or cooks the 18 by somehow proving that the position cannot be arrived at.
Not doing what’s expected comes as part of generating these problems, too. Some of these problems came about as a (failed) attempt to do something else, but ended up with an equally interesting, though different, idea.
Original Q & both Bs for each side, plus 8 pawns promoted to Bishops for each side. The Ns and Rs might (ought to?) provide just enough material to be captured to let pawns bypass each other on the way to being promoted.
EDITED to move the black Q from a3 to c2. In the original (a3) position, there was no way fro the black B to have gotten to b2.
All of the positions posted so far in this thread are already dead (except for the first of the two 18-piece positions, which is a failed attempt, as its poster pointed out). No mate by either side is possible, hence the positions are already dead, without the necessity of first capturing the loose pieces.
Nope. The position is already dead, even before the pieces are captured.
The following position –
– is a dead position. No mate is possible, so the game is already over. Black never gets to capture the queen.
Granted, in practice, black would simply take the queen, then the players would agree to a draw, and report their result accordingly. Technically, though, the game is already over without black taking the queen.
