The Checkmate Camino is Out!
I've just added a new book to tacticsladder.com! It's a collection of 10,000 carefully analyzed mate-in-two problems. Each puzzle has been evaluated on metrics like legal moves, unique checkmating moves, engine nodes used, calculation time, piece count, king mobility, and much more.
The puzzles are selected to include positions with 3–10 pieces, which makes them a bit more accessible. However, don’t be fooled—they’re still challenging! I chose these problems because they highlight patterns and solutions that are both practical and instructive. If you're looking for the absolute hardest puzzles, you’ll find them in my book on Amazon. But in this collection, I’ve focused on finding puzzles that are computationally demanding within the 3–10 piece range.
The title of the book, The Checkmate Camino, is inspired by the Camino de Santiago, the famous medieval Christian pilgrimage route. I chose this name because the book contains nearly three times as many mate-in-two problems as Polgar’s Chess. Completing it will require a similar level of dedication, and perhaps, like a pilgrimage, it may even lead you to a state of transcendence and chess revelation..
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This will likely be my last email before Christmas, so I want to take a moment to wish you and your loved ones a wonderful holiday! 🎄
/Martin
Excellent Martin. Thank you. I will soon have study time for a week or thereabouts. Have a Happy Holiday and Christmas yourself! All the best, John.
If on buys the book is it possible to get the set of positions as a dataset?
I do like that the curation is attempting to be transparent, and I would be curious if I were to use those, for my individual experience or not, to be able to use those as some well defined dataset with some well defined question set. Is that dreaming? It seems that even with more definable (try to) restrictoin chess is still big, but concentrating on checkmates not far from terminal position seemed like a good place to start getting reall with notions of patterns.
But the book barrier to well defined data sets, might be in the way. Since as kindle book it is in my range, I wonder if I would have such access or if I would have to add personal experience as another barrier? I welcome such chess position dataset the more transparently curated (i.e. reproducible or in that direction) the better.
happy hollidays.. and good tidings.