Ytreza wrote: Sat May 09, 2026 5:22 pm
I don't quite understand how the engine can win as black in the training if it doesn't know how to surround.
In training, it wins either by surrounding the king on four sides or by preventing the opponent from making any moves.
But I haven't seen a complete victories by surrounding of all pieces.
Usually white will avoid being surrounded by placing pieces along the edges, such that black will have to win by stalemate. It's the only way to win if white plays "maximally annoying" in the endgame. So it's not surprising that this is most frequent. However it also requires that black progressively closes around the edge(s) occupied by white, which requires a similar strategy of slowly enclosing, or moving a line across the board.
Might be that the quality of endgame is exceptionnally bad both for white and black at the moment. Might also be that white makes the mistake of repeating in this kind of situation where it's stuck, which would result in an easy win for black, and acustom the engine playing black of just waiting for white to repeat instead of proactively moving toward the win.
Ytreza wrote: Sun May 10, 2026 10:38 am
But then the engine never learns that it's bad to repeat, no?
And repetitions might be frequent in endgame where the engine has no clue what to do.
There may be a side effect, but it's difficult to extract any information from repetitions and understand what exactly the repetition resulted from. Anyway engine will do repetitions if it needed, because we have search.
Of course we can run experiments here and compare is it better to have repetitions in train games or not. Maybe it's not a big problem and we can keep this positions too.
As an example it took me only one try to trick it into repeating at a corner (and therefore losing despite the obvious potential - I didn't play very well as black here).
