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Using Stockfish to identify ideal squares
How can an engine be used to answer positional questions?
When one comes up with an answer, there is no easy way to check if it’s correct, so you would need to consult a stronger player, which isn't always feasible.Since this exercise is quite simple, I decided to try and write a program that identifies the ideal square for a given piece using Stockfish. It wanted to move the knight to c6 since Black can't prevent material loss, even if it is their move.So this problem needs to be addressed before looking at more positions. In order to get a feeling for the advantages and drawbacks of the program, I looked at many different examples taken from the excellent book Mastering Chess Strategy by Johan Hellsten.The first position is from the game Benko-Najdorf, 1963:
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