An Ode to Leonid

[Dann Corbit]

I don't know how many of you remember Leonid. He used to post fascinating checkmate positions to CCC back in the day:
http://www.stmintz.com/ccc/index.php?id=168165
He also wrote a mate solver that you can find with the wayback machine.
I used his mate solver to resurrect all of his stored positions (many he never posted to CCC). You have to run in an emulator.
I also discovered some interesting geometrical algorithms that can generate mates using patterns.
The result of all of this is a new checkmate test set.
I call the problem set Ode to Leonid, and it has 437,894 checkmates in it, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

You can find a copy of the test set here:
http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforu ... pid=550767

The mates are sorted from mate in 1 at the top to mate in 128 at the bottom.

[Dann Corbit]

I also used a tool by Les Fernandez that can take one checkmate, and generate many similar mates from it.

At any rate, I hope those who love solving perverse checkmates will get some fun out of it.

If you can solve one every ten seconds it will only take 51 days to solve them all (assuming you don't waste any time sleeping, eating, or working).