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Bison. Makes (1-3)-jump or (2-3)-jump.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Jul 2, 2008 11:11 PM UTC:
The Bison definitely has mating potential on an 8x8 board. Denoting Bison by Y: I have built a tablebase for the KYK end-game, and it is 100% won for white to move. (With black to move there are of course positions where the bare King captures an undefended Bison on the first move, and these are then draw.) Longest mate against best defense takes 27 moves.

I cannot build tablebases on other boards yet, but I adapted Joker80 so it would move Knights like Bisons. If I let it think a few min/move it does find mate in 20 or so in all psositions where the bare King is not too well centralized (and the white King is). As it is rather easy to drive the bare K out of he center with K+Y, this makes it likely that KYK is also won on 10x8. If I give the winning side a time-odds handicap of a factor 100, (40/60 vs 40/0:36) so it searches only 9-12 ply, where the defending King searches 22-28 ply, the bare King starting from w:Ke1,Yg1 b:Ke8 gets menouevred into mated-in-31 position quite rapidly (without the K+Y side knowing yet), after which it sees the mating net being tightened until the winning side finally gets a mate-in-12 within its horizon.

I couldn't say anything about 12x12.

Note that the Bison is equivalent to the patented Falcon in these games, as there is not enough material on the board to block the Falcon moves.