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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

What’s the solution? I’m a human and I can’t come up with a specific move I would call „the correct move“.

The board is backwards and black to move. It’s annoying in that chess puzzles should always have black on top and white on bottom, and a caption of whose move it is. It’s clear in the FEN, but the image reverses it with no explanation.

I mean, I disagree that a chess board should only ever be represented from the perspective of white. Or rather, I cannot square being even remotely decent at chess and being unable to figure out whose perspective it is from the labelling of the ranks and files.

It's just a norm and has been for centuries. For composed positions it should also generally be white to move.

You're right that this isn't necessary (particularly when the board is labeled) but by doing something weird you're just going to distract and confuse some chunk of people from the point you're trying to make - exactly as happened here.

Note that it's black to move and black's pawn moves upwards. All move but one has instant counterplay from white.

Here's the board; you can enable the engine to get the answer: https://lichess.org/analysis/standard/8/6B1/8/8/B7/8/K1pk4/8...

Same!

Winning is not possible: only the queen is strong enough to win against two bishops, and that fails to the check and loss of queen from black tiled bishop.

So draw is most one can get. Underpromoting to knight (with check, thus avoiding the check by the bishop) is the only way to promote and keep the piece another move.

I guess in this situation the knight against two bishops keeps the draw.

I didn’t even know you could pick which piece you want to promote to. But I’m also not an average chess player.

So the correct move is to move the Pawn up and promote to knight?

Thanks!

> I guess in this situation the knight against two bishops keeps the draw.

Yes, though - I think I can say without exaggeration - no human on earth can tell you exactly which positions the knight can hold out against the bishops for the required 50 moves.

So it's a strange problem: a perceptive beginner can find the right move through a process of elimination, but even a super-GM can't be certain it's good enough, or defend it accurately against a computer. I don't see anything about that that makes it a particularly good test of an LLM.

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