Hello chess composers/solvers,At the chess composition congress in Pula I posted a sheet of paper for e-mail addresses. Somebody walked away with that sheet before I could recover it on the day after the banquet; fortunately I made a photocopy the night before and so I have most of the addresses, to which I added several from my files and some that Thomas Maeder provided from the literature. The list appears below, with five compoers' names deleted because I have the address from private correspondence but not permission to make the address public. (Addresses from the literature I presume to be intended for public dissemination.) If you receive this e-mail but are not on the list below, and wish to be, please inform me.
A couple of days ago I had dinner at the home of a British colleague who had the previous week's issue of the Manchester Guardian Weekly. In the chess column I noticed a familiar position: the Mladenovic #2 that gave many of us trouble at Pula. In fact that trouble was noted in the following paragraph, together with Mestel's victory and his first-ever double GM title in over-the-board play as well as solving. :-) The British team's third-place finish was mentioned too; the first and second place teams were not identified. ;-(
A note to endgame folk: the Thompson 5-man database is accessible on the Web! The address is http://www3.traveller.com/scripts/chess_kt_endings (http://www3.traveller.com/chess/ being the archives of the Huntsville [Alabama] Chess Club, whatever that is). To determine whether a given position is won for White, follow the above address with the Forsyth notation and +w or +b depending on whether White or Black is to move; e.g. the Saavedra endgame is
http://www3.traveller.com/scripts/chess_kt_endings/8/8/1KP5/3r4/8/8/8/k7/+w
In response you'll get a diagram, the evaluation, the number of moves to win if there is a win, a list of optimal moves, and a list of all possible moves, which each move that changes the win/not-win evaluation (necessarily for the worse) marked with "?". Moreover each move is a link, so by clicking on moves one can follows the analysis of the endgame without having to enter new Forsyth each time. Note that if White is trying to draw you must reverse the colors before submitting the position.
Enjoy,
--Noam D. Elkies (elkies@math.harvard.edu)
And additional message:
The only problem is that Wlodek Proskurowski (I now have his permission to add his address to the list: proskuro@mathn.usc.edu) tried the endgame database site and it no longer works! Please either suppress that paragraph or wait until we find a correct site.