Sorry, I still don't understand the explanation in post #47.
You said that if your opponent times out and you don't have enough material to win under normal circumstances (i.e. your opponent doesn't play suicidal), it's a draw. You also said the position is irrelevant.
Now consider this example:
Under normal circumstances you can't deliver a checkmate with just two knights. It requires either suicidal play from the opponent, or a special position; but you said, the position is irrelevant.
So according to your explanation the game should be drawn, but the current implementation correctly rated it as black's victory (the game would continue Kg1 Nf3#).
If anyone knows, what the current rules actually are, please tell; I'm curious about it.
"So we agree, a player who runs out of time should lose the game, no matter what the situation is on the board?"
Hi again, sorry I had problems accessing Internet and keeping up with things here. :P
I'm willing to settle for that.
I was thinking we could still use my list since nothing but a King and King+Bishop vs. King+Rook are the two most common cases, but you know just as well as I do that that doesn't cover everything consistently. (Then again, neither does the list of "Insufficient Material" automatic draw positions, so maybe use a list for both rules and be "consistently inconsistent?")
I'll leave that preference up to you I guess.
But I believe that doing an always loss is a straightforward-enough solution to making this rules system changed all for the better.
thibault barely has to do any work besides considering it. :P
hey meph you are not russian then why you are in team Russian Chess Players
There's no need to say sorry, such things can happen to all of us.
Well, thanks to your last post, I understand the current implementation now.
It looks like the current implementation compares the material on the board to the material that is required by FIDE's insufficient material rule to be a draw.
So the current system is indeed consistently inconsistent, because the implementation of the immediate draw rule also doesn't cover all cases.
I don't like that because the current system has "false positives", i.e. cases where the system sees a draw, although one side should lose the game. I tried to give an example for this in post #4 of the other thread.
To be honest, for a long time, I also believed the rules to be to always lose the game if one's time runs out. Maybe because the always lose system is just more intuitive.
The current implementation covers the most common cases; but the game during which I got to know the timeout rules also showed me that the "uncommon positions" are an essential part of chess!
So my point of view is that the "always lose" system is the best (least bad) implementation of the FIDE rules, because it is intuitive for beginners, and there's no need to worry about whether all positions are covered.
Hmmm ok, and now I understand your point more fully. I see what you mean about being consistently inconsistent. I never had the misconception going into this that you could win a game on time with insufficient material to win. However, I could see how it would be more intuitive to simply believe that. I also see what you mean now about codification in the website notation somewhere.
I guess we see each other's positions more clearly now and agree that we disagree, but at least agree on a few points. And yes, I would never have ever considered some of these "winable" positions to be as such before, so if nothing else it's increased my knowledge base of endgame positions, if only to maybe examine a "lost" position on time more clearly if I'm ever in a tournament to see if there's a win "possible" if under FIDE rules. ;)
Odd though I think a mod removed my last post in this thread. Regardless, I will also apologize for being a bit belligerent in making my point. I can be a rude person when it comes to debates, especially when I am frustrated at myself for not being clear enough in the first place that I have to make my point several times. lol
Look, I want to avoid doing more than the required amount of changes to the side code, just as much as you do, or thibault.
That's why I presented a *minimalist* change.
Again, look at #1 OP of this thread. You see a link to a game that should have been won but falsely assumed as a draw.
It's very easy to fix, Wulfsiege. Your idea that any timeout is always a loss, never a draw, would be ONE of the ways to fix that had that actually been the system used here! But it's not. It's still flawed and can be very easily modified to patch such games, which are not extremely uncommon in tense time-pressure endgames.
You can try and say AAAH the site's rules are good-enough why do more work, but the result is that more people are going to be confused as fuck.
Hell, until now I never knew there was a rule that you could draw on timeout.