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How God Plays Chess (2018)
In the early 1980s Ken Thompson, working at the Bell Laboratories, generated one of the world’s first chess endgame databases — king and queen vs king and rook. At the time he explained to Frederic Friedel how this revolutionary new technology worked. He did it in the form of a parable: God calculating the 32-piece endgame and playing chess. It is an amusing thought experiment that has gained interesting relevance at the current time.
The result: over 1.7 million positions got a number between 0 and 61, which means that the maximum length of a win in the endgame queen vs rook is 31 moves. And then came the six-piece endings, which required truly massive computing power to calculate — and plenty of hard disk space to store. They will in fact use the endgame knowledge in the search, so that positions with many more than six pieces that can be traded down to advantageous six or five-piece endings will be handled perfectly as well.
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