What's the best tactical test suite for the modern erA?

[gaard]

Dear lovely CCC community,

I'm currently working on a Tech 4 technology chess program to continue the lineage of these super-simple search monsters 50 years after Tech 2 competed in the 1st WCCC in 1974.
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Tech

Squirrel and I have been away from chess programming for a while: last code written in 1997, last completion in 2011, but one thing is clear is how easily modern engines on modern hardware make some of the hard test suites of yesteryear seem trivial!

Does anyone have and recommendations for a suite(s) of test positions which will test Tech 4's tactical ability i.e. very deep combinations which lead to material win or mate.

Many thanks in advance
John

Your best bet might be creating your own. Some chess GUIs have a blunder check feature, and allow you to set the threshold for what a blunder is in centipawns. If you ran a lot of very fast games and used a blender check tool with a much larger time limit to analyze those games, you could put together a lot of positions quickly. The longer the time control for the games you use, the deeper the tactics will be uncovered in the blunder check.

[chesskobra]

Your best bet might be creating your own. Some chess GUIs have a blunder check feature, and allow you to set the threshold for what a blunder is in centipawns. If you ran a lot of very fast games and used a blender check tool with a much larger time limit to analyze those games, you could put together a lot of positions quickly. The longer the time control for the games you use, the deeper the tactics will be uncovered in the blunder check.

I was thinking about a similar solution, but instead of first playing engine games and then doing blunder check, it would be nice if a program like cutechess had an option to output positions of interest while a game is being played. For example, you play a game between Stockfish and another engine, and at some point the advantage of SF increases by a specified threshold (from SF perspective), but the evaluation does not change much from the point of view of the other engine, then it is quite likely that the other engine missed something that SF is able to see (or the other engine is right and SF is wrong). Then you output the position. Since cutechess-gui already shows evaluations of both engines, it may not be much work to output what I am suggesting. I believe this will also be easier than parsing pgn files that contain evaluations (e.g. CCRL games).

[Michel]

https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles

[Magnum]

Dear lovely CCC community,

I'm currently working on a Tech 4 technology chess program to continue the lineage of these super-simple search monsters 50 years after Tech 2 competed in the 1st WCCC in 1974.
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Tech

Squirrel and I have been away from chess programming for a while: last code written in 1997, last completion in 2011, but one thing is clear is how easily modern engines on modern hardware make some of the hard test suites of yesteryear seem trivial!

Does anyone have and recommendations for a suite(s) of test positions which will test Tech 4's tactical ability i.e. very deep combinations which lead to material win or mate.

Many thanks in advance
John

Top Chess Engines Testsuite 2024 v2
See how much you can solve
https://www.mediafire.com/file/cypaz2t0 ... 2.pgn/file