jgisland.pl

J.G. Island Chess Moremovers - Hints for efficient usage

  • Start solving from the main position (do not start solving from position with some moves made on the program chessboard).
    Heuristics and threading selection are applied only to the main position.
    Position after moves made on chessboard can be efficiently handled only if the main position was earlier solved and all the temporary data is still present in memory (size of temp.data is depicted near Start button)

  • It's important to properly set stipulation (condition #n). With higher #n, the analysis tree - and analysis time - grows exponentially

  • If #n unknown, the initial value can be low, e.g. #10-#12 and gradually increased if checkmate not found - but one thing is very important: the option to clean temporary register must be off (save settings with this value), so that the next analysis is not started with empty temp.reg. (solution hash table)

  • If main variant is known, it can be "backward-verified", starting from the last #8-#10 - and gradually increasing #n.
    Again, a few details are very important:
    - although we start analysis from some resultant position (after many moves), it should be the main position for the program (for example if user makes moves on the original problem, then the position can be copied and then pasted into the program window as the main position)
    - the option to clear temporary data on start solving should be off to avoid starting any further analysis with empty temp.reg.
    - all operations should be performed within the same problem - no navigation (left/right) should be made, since it automatically clears temp.reg. (the only expception is when user manually saves temp.reg. and later reloads it again - however only users of version Complete can save temp.reg. files of size higher than 1MB)

  • The program does not have a "study mode" yet - it does not verify if any position is an obvious win - it always searches for checkmate. It's not well optimized for study-like positions either, anyway there is one option that can increase speed when analysing positions with low number of pieces on chessboard (no more than 7 pieces, or position reducible to 7 pieces or fewer) : the option specifing moves level to get solution from Lichess/Syzygy should be increased from 1 to much more. The original setting is 1 (to take details for starting position only), since getting details from internet is relatively time-consuming and, what's worse, blocking threads (only one query to Syzygy/Lichess at a time). However the solutions downloaded from Lichess/Syzygy are cached in folder SavedTmpSyzygyData, so any further usage will be much faster (the bad thing is there is no global cache, but they are cached per starting position)