ICC Help: problembot

ProblemBot is similar to TrainingBot (see help TrainingBot), except that it is for chess compositions. While TrainingBot has fairly practical positions often adapted from real games, most ProblemBot puzzles are unusual-looking positions with surprising, subtle and often quite beautiful answers. Also, some of the ProblemBot puzzles have stipulations or unusual goals, so be sure to read the problem statement. As with TrainingBot, the problems have all be submitted by ICC users.

ProblemBot will kibitz what the goal is, the category, who submitted the problem, any specific stipulation, and the difficulty level (from one to eight stars). If you don't see this message, perhaps you have kibitzes disabled. You can enable kibitzes with "set kibitz 1" or via the Options menu.

You can use "say hint" to get a hint, if the problem author put one in. Or "say give" and ProblemBot will tell you the next move. Or "say skip" if you just want to skip this problem. After completing or skipping the problem, you can use "rematch" or "play problembot" to get the next problem.

If you only want problems in a specific category, you can use "tell problembot category <category>" before doing "play problembot". Categories are:

Two-movers Three-movers More-movers Studies Helpmates (not implemented yet, but you can submit them) Selfmates (see below) Retros (see below) Unorthodox Compositions (miscellaneous)

In Selfmates, you are to FORCE Black to checkmate the white king in N moves (avoiding checkmating the Black king). If the problem is designated as a Reflexmate problem, then both players operate under the additional constraint that they must play mate-in-one whenever possible.

Retros are problems requiring retrograde analysis, i.e. requiring that you deduce something about the past moves that led to the position, which is guaranteed to be a position reachable by a legal sequence of moves. You may castle unless it can be proven that castling is illegal. But you may capture en passant only if you can prove that Black's last move was the appropriate two-square pawn advance. (Occasionally these two conditions are co-dependant, e.g. in some positions one can prove that en passant is legal if and only if castling is also legal! In such a case, if the problem specifies the "A Posteriori" rule, you may capture en passant only if you later validate it by castling. The problem might instead specify that you should find a solution for each possibility.)

Other commands you can give ProblemBot before doing "play ProblemBot": "tell problembot category All" if all problems are okay. "tell problembot erase my record" to make it forget which problems you've already solved. "tell problembot number <number>" to request a particular problem. "tell problembot progress" for a count of the problems remaining.

See help TrainingBot for information about how to submit a problem.

See also: TrainingBot, examine