From: Adam Atkinson MISTRAL CO UK> Date: 7 oct 1995 Subject: Re: King in check Samuel Sloan says: >Although legal, your position is preposterous. White would have had to drop >all of his pawns on his opponent's second rank from which they could not move >forward, or else deliberately fail to promote his pawns. > >The shogi rules are not precise, even in dealing with fairly common >siutations. I doubt if there is any shogi rule or any need for one in the >rediculous position here suggested. I'm not disputing that this position is ridiculous. It's obviously what I had in mind when I said a few days ago that stalemate was possible but unlikely. For human-human play the issue can be ignored, but when writing a computer program to play Shogi it would be best to have a way to deal with such situations... a large search tree could include some very odd positions. If moving into check is illegal, stalemate becomes a lot easier to set up, of course, but the position under discussion shows that even if moving into check is legal, stalemate can be set up. (If moving into check is legal, then you will only do it when no other moves are available, and then you lose, of course) Of course, other similar positions arise. The player could have some pawns in hand, and there could be other (captured then dropped) pieces in the morass. Indeed, the stalemated player could probably have most of the pieces in the game and thus an overwhelming material advantage. In Chinese Chess you'd have lost. Do any Japanese players on the list have strong feelings one way or another about how a no-legal-moves position would/should be treated? (imagine here that the real issue is what a computer search should do about such as positions - it's clear that a real game is unlikely ever to end up like this) -- -- Adam Atkinson - ghira mistral co uk We know Jesus must have been Italian for three reasons - he lived at home until he was 30, he thought his mother was a virgin and she thought he was God.