iCE and the "wrong" bishop

iCE vs Gaviota    55. Rxe7   1/2 : 1/2

After my failed pawn structure experiment I was looking for a small task that has a high chance of success in making my engine better ... just to overcome my disappointment.

I remembered that one of the nice folks that tested my engine after release wrote iCE doesn't know about the wrong bishop. iCE is reporting large winning scores in dead drawn games.

I got a reference of a game against gaviota 0.86. Where iCE exchanged into a endgame with the wrong bishop (diagram).

After the exchange 55. Rxe7 Kxe7 56. Kxe5 iCE found itself in this position and evaluated it with +7. So it thought it is winning,

Draw (wrong bishop)

Of course it is not.

56. ...     Kf8
57. Kf6  Kg8

and the black king controls the corner.






So this is a sign of missing chess knowledge. Humans will see the draw rather easily and if an engine scores such a position as winning it makes a bit a fool out of himself (and its author). The funny thing is, that iCE actually knows about the wrong bishop in king, bishop and pawn vs. king endgames. It did not apply this knowledge because black still owns a pawn. So the endgame module did not kick in (this requires a bare king).

In the above position iCE would not have captured the pawn at f7 (although it could). Its knowledge tells him that without the black pawn the position is a draw. So it tried to keep the black pawn alive and made silly looking moves instead.

To overcome that I coded a few lines to teach iCE about the wrong bishop in a KBPKP endgame. It is a bit more difficult than the original KBPK endgame. In some positions black can still win and in some positions having still a pawn is the losing fact for black. But finally I came up with a good set of positions that are recognized as drawn.

Now this knowledge helps in the above position

iCE 2.0 v1001 x32 [2013.12.2]
position fen 8/3Rbp2/5k2/4n3/2B1K2P/8/8/8 w - - 3 55
go depth 8
info depth 7 seldepth 10 time 0 nodes 2448 pv d7e7 e5c4 e7c7 c4d2 e4d5 f6g6 d5e5  nps 2447999 score cp 586
info depth 8 seldepth 11 time 15 nodes 17773 pv d7c7 e5c4 c7c4 f6g6 e4f3 g6h5 f3g3 f7f5 nps 1184866 score cp 477

At depth 8 iCE realizes that the exchange leads to a wrong bishop endgame and selects a different move.

Probably this not worth a single ELO point, but as I'm not belonging to the only ELO matters fraction it is worth keeping.