Eugene Nalimov will receive the ChessBase Best-Publication Award on July 10 at the General ICCA Meeting for creating an making his tablebases plus generator program publicly available. Next to the honour and the prize made available by ChessBase, the Award has its intrinsic part, the publication of the brief scientific biography, published below.

Eugene Nalimov was born in Novosibirsk (then in the USSR, now in Russia) in 1965. He received his M.Sc. at Novosibirsk University (Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics) in 1989. He then worked for several years in the Institute of Informatics Systems of Soviet (after 1991 Russian) Academy of Sciences and participated in several compiler-related projects. Moreover, he worked on Ph.D. thesis, but never finished it, as he moved to industry. In 1997 Nalimov joined Microsoft.

Chess programming is just his hobby. He wrote a chess program that was USSR champion among chess programs in 1991 (so this was the last USSR champion), but did not not have sufficient time to continue working on it. A generator of endgame tablebases was written during his holidays in 1998, and since then he is working on solving endgames. This year he hopes to finish the generation of all pawnless 3+3 and 4+2 6-man tables. Thereafter, he will start working on endgames with Pawns.

The lecture

On Monday, Nalimov gave a lecture on tablebases. Over the years, the construction of chess endgame tablesbases has proven to be a challenging area. The techniques developed to solve an arbitrary chess endgame have made considerable progress in the last five years. Nowadays tablebase constructors are able to deal with a variety of issues. Some chess-specific issues are Pawns (two steps, one step, capture, en passant capture ) pronotions (Queen, Rook, Bishop and Knight) and the 50-move rule. The technical issues were: compression, reflection, and access. Nalimov gave on overview of his work to date and the state of affairs today. All the 3 vs. 3 men pawnless tables are done,  also the majority of the 4 vs. 2 pawnless tables arte done, the remaining ones should be done in a about a month. 

The challenge ahead are the 6 men endgames with pawns. The main problem, except for some technical ones, is simply time. It is still a hobby project for Nalimov. Good news for endgame study composers and other endgame lovers: the 2 pawns against 2 pawns endgames will be available in the next years. There was a big crowd during the lecture: all the top-programmers sat down like schoolboys listening to what 36-year old Nalimov had to say. 

The question, how the situation would be in 25 years, Nalimov smiled and answered: Well, I think that we will not get much further than solving endgames with 8 men on the board. But is just a feeling, some years ago I never thougt that I would get that far with my tablebases as I am today”.

Blitztournament and Simul with GM Boris Alterman

We had just one round today, in which we saw some very interesting games. Junior won a good game with black against Brutus, Shredder played very well against Sjeng and won with ease. Diep and Quest played a draw. 

Diep has not been able to play with his super 60 processor hardware since round 2 due to several problems, and had to switch to his Dual Ahtlon. It was simply not possible to adjust the engine to this amount of processors in just a few weeks. Now Diepeveen is playing with his successful Leiden engine. 

In the afternoon the very exciting blitz tournament with 12 programs will be played, after that GM Boris Alterman will play a simul against no less than 16 programs! It is hard enough to win against one computer, as Gulko, Smirin, Gurevich and others showed the last few months. 

Alterman: brave man or madman? You can read all about it in the next report from Maastricht.

©Eric van Reem, 9 July 2002