Dear Ed Trice,

I have reviewed your geocities posting cursorilly, and would like to say "thank you"
for that. It is something I have always wondered about, and now I need wonder no longer. An interesting observation is, that while my perview was hasty and superficial, I probably spent at least as long looking it over as your computer spent generating it in all its precision.

While I cannot claim to think as a computer does, it is nevertheless significant to me, and therefore worth the mention, that several points come to mind as I see your results:

1) The solutions for checkmate as given are mostly impossible to achieve in real life play. This does not detract from their value for the computer, however, for in view of the purpose of this list being to generate the answer to my question, I acknowledge and appreciate this fact.

2) The first 148 mates are with the bishop of one color, and then starting with #149 the bishop changes color. This infers that the following 147 positions are likely a repetition or mirroring of the first 148, and so on for the other 2 corners.

3) Of these first 148, only the first 65 are with the Black king in the bishop's color of corner, the rest are on the side of the board between corners, where nobody ever achieves checkmate when the defensive king moves correctly. Others, among the first 65, may be legitimate mating positions, but inasmuch as they cannot be arrived at in real play, they would also never happen in a live game. These in question are all, therefore, practically impossible.

4) The checkmates that Capablanca exemplifies in his writings (I am not aware of any in his actual games, but if anyone knows of one, please let me know!) are to be found at positions 2, 32, 151, 195, 338, 382, 501, and 531. They are all the same arrangement of pieces, however, placed in the 4 corners, right hand and left hand, as it were.

I have tried to arrive at an answer for your challenge to find the starting position for the longest possible checkmate for these 4 pieces, and it is a daunting task, to say the least. If I give you an answer now, it would be a shot in the dark, for I do not have time to think about it right now. After studying your 8x8 solution, it seems that I am not well prepared to render an educated conclusion in regards to this question.
Although, if you are giving us a deadline, I will put mine in, just to be a participant. Please let me know if there is a time limit on this.

And thank you, again, Ed, for your diligence. /Fx/