brainwagon

I was goofing around with my program, and had loaded a problem that was supposedly a win for Red, and set it searching. After searching to thirty or so ply, Milhouse was still convinced the position was drawn. I then tried examining it in Cake to 10 ply deeper, and it was still looking like a draw. I wondered what the analysis of the position was, so I tried to see if I could find a copy of Gould’s book online. I found it first on archive.org, but the quality of the scan is pretty uneven: some of the pages are misaligned and cutoff. But luckily, I found that Google Books had digitized it. For some odd reason, downloading the PDF seems to result in a file which has all the diagrams stripped out, but if you page through it using their online viewer, it works just fine. The PDF might include some elements which require real Adobe Acrobat to render properly, but the overall quality is quite good. Here’s the particular puzzle I was looking at:

The game of draughts. Problems, critical positions, and games By Joseph Gould

Here’s a link to the page that contains the analysis. I’ll try to present my “refutation” after I work through it a bit more.