Ralph Stoesser wrote:To remove the stalemate rule would be a major change. Most chess studies would be worthless. The character of the game would change too much. Additionally it would result in a change of the FIDE rules, but nobody here proposes to change the FIDE rules. The proposal is to overrule the 50 move rule in case of
1) pure engine competition
2) a tablebase checkmate has been found in current position
First, how does that not change the FIDE rules?
Second, what means "a tablebase checkmate has been found in current position"?
In game 17, SF did not find a checkmate or a tablebase checkmate. Btw, what is the difference between "checkmate" and "tablebase checkmate"?
Perhaps you mean that the 50-move rule should be ignored in any position that somewhere in the world or in this universe by calculation has been determined to be a checkmate (for a chess-like game that is not FIDE chess) prior to the date that the TCEC game is played? Do you care at all whether the engines know about this calculation and have access to it? Do you care at all whether the TCEC adjudication mechanism has access to it?
Or do you mean that whatever the TCEC TB adjudication mechanism returns must be accepted as correct, whether the TBs it uses are faulty or not?
Third, I don't get why people are looking into changing a clear rule into something funny just to solve this problem when there is the very simple and correct solution of adjudicating to the correct result. It is trivial to look up the correct result of 5-piece positions. In addition, the engines are aware of the correct results and choose their moves having in mind the correct results.