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H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, May 13 08:30 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 07:35 PM:

Why would you take the King off the board for this?

The purpose of the accelerated check test is not only to determine whether the King is in check in the current position, but also to greatly facilitate testing whether the King would get exposed by any of the moves. One contribution to this is to mark every square where the King itself cannot go. The King is taken off to prevent it would block enemy slider moves (or lame leaps), creating the illusion that it would be safe to "step into his own shadow".

The test is NOT done by only processing all pseudo-legal moves. Because that would not reveal which pieces are protected (and thus cannot be captured by the King). For the purpose of knowing where the King could go the move generator should basically work under the fiction that all destinations contain the enemy King. That applies to empty squares as well friendly pieces; these will be marked as inaccessible to the King when the move hitting those is a move that can capture. Even when it cannot capture what is actually there.

The code I use avoids this by trying each pseudo-legal move and checking whether any piece in the new position is checking the King.

That would indeed be an alternative: do a full king-capture test after every King move. But it would be more expensive, as a King usually has several moves. So you would have to do enemy move generation several times. (And who knows how mobile a royal piece can be, in a chess variant?) Testing whether a destination contains the King is not any more expensive than marking the destination. And to do it, you only need to geenrate all enemy moves once. Then for each King moves only have to test whether the destination is marked. And to know whether you are in check it would just have to test whether the square the King is currently on is marked.

But the fiction that every square where you are allowed to capture contains a King should also be applied to locust captures. And this wasn't done.

The accelerated check test would not work in variants where there are multiple absolute royals. (Extinction royaly is no problem; there it just skips the check test completely if there still is more than one royal.)


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