On Solving the Problem of 7-Piece Chess Endgames

Abstract

This paper discusses the brightest achievements in the field of chess informatics. We would especially like to note that, during the work of Mikhail Romanovich Shura-Bura at the Moscow State University (MSU), researchers from the MSU were leading this field: in 1973, the Kaissa program won the world computer chess championship. Later, the leadership was lost. It was regained in 2012, when scientists from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics (CMC) of the MSU generated a complete tablebase of 7-piece chess endgames on a Lomonosov supercomputer and found the longest known checkmate in 549 moves.