I hate the threefold repetition rule

OK, let me spoon feed you: https://pdb.dieschwalbe.de/P1011937 42. Tg8+= is the final move, but it's not forced. **Please explain your exact issue**, without skimming off into generalities.

Rules for chess problems must always have minor differences from FIDE Laws (1) to automate human decisions, and (2) provide necessary game history. We do have a problem notion of "retro" which is like a mini-reality of its own already, and that's fine. I am looking to understand DP/3Rep/50M in that context.

I am flabbergasted! Can't see what's wrong with the problem any more. Of course it is also DP but that does not change the fact that it looks like a valid drawn composition. Have to sleep on it! Had no clue it was from 2003. Btw, I only visit the the PDB once about every 10 years and then I have to restudy the instructions.

Arguments around "automating human decisions" carry no weight since the 5R and 75M moves have precisely the same characteristics. Actually, that will prove to be their main application. Computer-interfaces can now replace humans in automatically terminating dead positions since absolutely nothing could happen (not even flagging, or resigning or checkmate) to change the outcome after 5R or 75M lines were crossed.

I suddenly remember something about my problem. Something to do with a dual repetition cycle which loses a tempo which comes back by relying on the certainty that the ..Bf8 move need not be played due to DP! Just as in your PG12.5 but with a different history.

Hi @arisktotle,

Thank you. I will enjoy going through this problem, and posting a detailed solution. My own thinking has evolved in the last few years, so please bear with me. I am glad there is a coherent picture for otb chess. That's a good foundation. Now onwards to problem chess.

* I don't think problems ever become unsound because of rules/conventions changes/clarifications. This is what the "Golden Age" tag is for, to allow us as proper anthropologists of our hobby to track the context in which problems were conceived.

* OTB, humans choose moves, resign, make claims, offer draws & respond to offers. All of that gets automated in problems (e.g. in directmates, white attempts to mate in n, black defends).

"DP just looks at the tree of legal moves, which has nothing to do with 75M/3Rep termination."

Not quite as the FIDE laws are currently printed. It also looks at whether series in the the tree (which is not the game tree - serialmover mates are also series of legal moves, for example) can be played.

5.2.2 The game is drawn when a position has arisen in which neither player can checkmate the opponent’s king with any series of legal moves. The game is said to end in a ‘dead position’. This immediately ends the game, provided that the move producing the position was in accordance with Article 3 and Articles 4.2 – 4.7.

I know you're up to almost any challenge, but I challenge you to find a series of legal moves with which either player can checkmate the opponent's king under FIDE competition rules from this (partially specified) position.

If you believe it can't be done then you have to accept that the above blue paragraph tells you straightforwardly that the game is terminated by DP under FIDE competition rules. (It may also be terminated by other rules, but that's by the by.)

The self reference comes from the fact that the condition that a player can checkmate with a series of legal moves constrains the series to be playable under the rules, but, without any caveat, "the rules" includes the above blue paragraph.

That's all without any mention of the WFCC Codex.

Note that the 75 move rule says "9.6.2 any series of at least 75 moves have been made by each player without the movement of any pawn and without any capture. If the last move resulted in checkmate, that shall take precedence."

The key words are "have been made", NOT "will be made".

Also note that 9.6 is not part of articles 3 and 4 and thus it is not part of the dead position rule.

From a practical standpoint it is safer to avoid the correct ending of a game to dependent on an arbiter's analysis ability. I've seen arbiters looking at White Kd3, Rf2 vs Black Ke1 thinking that White's fastest mate is playing Ra2 Kf1, Ke3 Kg1, Kf3 Kh1, Kg3, Kg1 Ra1# - totally missing the simple two-mover (such an arbiter might call a draw if the position was on move sequence 72 even though there is a forced mate on move sequence 74). If an arbiter has to carry around an analysis tool and put each position into it looking for a possible forced 75-move draw then that takes a lot of the arbiters time that needs to be spent monitoring games to make sure they comply with the other rules - such analysis only being practical in smaller round robins where the players are likely already strong enough to make the 50-move claims that don't require arbiter intervention.

I sympathize with "Golden Age" classifications as long as their "Golden Age" actually exists(ed). I am convinced (and I predicted) that FIDE always believed that 5R and 75M would be "invisible" to DP and probably believed that stalemate is invisible as well. But they never thought this through and never incorporated it in the rules. And now that they betrayed their inner thoughts to @jetoba, it is still not official in the texts. Which raises the question on when exactly that "Golden Age" exists(ed) for the DP-rule interpretation that agrees with your PG12.5 and when the other "Golden Age" exists(ed) which ratifies my 2003 PG41.5 which requires invisibility of 5R/75M draws to the DP-rule. "Golden Ages" can only be assigned when the rules were clear to everyone.

The peculiar situation is that the introduction of the 5R/75R drawing automats in the FIDE laws - effectively the same as the already existing 3R/50M automats in the Codex with different numbers - brought to light an ambiguity in the FIDE laws on DP. Those DP-rules were not changed and only recently received some "clarfication". The Codex has no DP-rule of its own and is now faced with a FIDE-clarification which has gone opposite to the one adopted in the Retro-community. Both choices were made to fill the same "law void" as this situation existed and required resolution for both communities!

Yes, FIDE has to deal with all those "OTB" (which today includes digital enviroments) issues which sets it apart from the problem-community. But what happened here is that FIDE actually eliminated the option of human choice in 5R and 75R moving more in the direction of the problem-environment and less dependent on human interaction. And BANG! the 2 environments clash, not on human interaction, but on visibility between interacting laws!

Arisktotle, note that I was only consulting experienced IAs about OTB, not about problem-solving.

I know, and all of us know! The point is that the FIDE laws automatically flow to the orthodox composition environment (unless specifically amended like 3R and 50M). Not by necessity but by convenience. The WFCC would hate to define castling moves which they can inherit from the FIDE laws. There is an issue of synchronization points, like which FIDE laws version is invoked for which Codex version. However that is not an issue here since the DP-rule was never amended only clarified.

The DP-rule is only about the future, never about what has taken place. The DP-rule has no interest in any other rule except in the definition of checkmate. All it does is continue the game by the rules in all the ways it could have been continued by the players to find a "checkmate" and rule according to its findings. It could not have found a checkmate beyond the 5th occurrence of the same position and would base its conclusion (among others) on this finding.

Note that all complexity around the DP-rule - like the relationship with 5R and 75M - comes from FIDE, not from the compositions community. It only suggests DP-analysis by "playing on by the rules" and now FIDE says "Ho, ho, but not by the 5R/75R rules!!" MARattigan explained that but apparently it didn't stick.

Many decades ago, when I first read about the dead rule(s), my first thought was "THIS IS GONNA GIVE TROUBLE, especially for compositions". I actually remember thinking that. I have not been disappointed in my predictions!

It happened in FIDE - just as it also happens in the WFCC - because you can't develop a rule system for a reasonably rich abstract game without mathematical scrunity. You always need the User Manual to communicate it to the community and the System Manual to provide formal definitions, design concepts, mathematical soundness checks and intricate algorithms.

The DP-rules go wrong on line 1 not understanding you need slightly advanced mathematical logic (like RAA = Reduction Ad Absurdum) to avoid contradictions, circularity and undecidables for this issue. Of course, that's for the System Manual, the User Manual need not be that precise.

I don't know about this but the last one similar that you showed was fake, because the position couldn't have been reached (including the ply count) unless the winning side had deliberately been wasting moves.

Actually, I'm kidding. This is also fake so your argument's meaningless.

It's worse than that. In the range between 50 and 0 plies from the 75R mark all moves are "fake" in all games since either side could have claimed a draw on every move. What they were doing in that stretch looks more like "playing chicken" than a serious chess game. Nevertheless, it turns out that GMs do play these games - up to and even beyond the 75M mark! That in itself makes DP and the draw rules meaningful for arbitration!

If you're in a terrible position and feel bad, won't it be nice to NOT lose? Imagine YOU'RE playing white. Won't you want to not lose? Besides, would you want to endlessly repeat moves until somebody loses on time, or play until infinity in a game with an increment?

The threefold repetition rule is VERY important. I wouldn't like to lose in a terrible position.

The position is from Gothamchess' "How to Win at Chess" book. Black has just lost their queen. But they can save the game.

There is no self-reference. Legal moves are defined in Article 3. That's it. DP refers to legal moves in that context. That's it. There is no term in FIDE rules to describe the moves which are playable or unplayable due to DP. But one *cannot* reuse the terms "legal" & "illegal" for those, except in a casual sense. And even there, I think I will discourage it now, because it seems as if it is genuinely confusing for some.

You have emphasized one word "can" on the the DP rule as if that means it has a certain interpretation. But the arbiters have spoken to say how it works, and they make complete sense. Please move on.

Your position with 149 on the counter is not dead over the board. The game will stop when the next move is played. (Incidentally, endgames with moves on the clock are really interesting: there's a guy, Galen Huntington, who has put an engine together to analyze those. If this kind of position interests you, then you should really check him out. His algorithm is cool too. Of course, like most positions in a regular tablebase, they are virtually impossible to occur in everyday play, but that's never an argument against analyzing them.)

DP & 75M is a corner case anyway, but to use your confusion over just that corner case as a justification for DP to go is absurd.

The idea that a "series of moves" can avoid alternative play by white & black is clever, but "seriesmover" is only a problemist term. Article 1.1 specifies that play must be alternate, and FIDE arbiter has discretion to ensure that sanity is retained.

OTB, the FIDE laws work *fine*, DP rule works *fine* for 25 years - please let go of all this and let's move on to the problem space where there is potentially real debate to be had.

You didn't rise to my challenge.

If you attempt it, I think it will become abundantly clear that the position is dead under the DP rule unless you stretch the English beyond breaking point.

MAR, the king and pawns position you posted earlier is dead not because of a move counter, but because even with an unlimited number of moves there is no way for either side to deliver a checkmate.

In the issues with a 75-move rule positions you mentioned the positions are not even dead (because an unlimited number of moves have checkmate as a possibility). You can look at such positions as becoming drawn, but not yet drawn. There is some confusion with the term "dead drawn" but that is not the term applied to a dead position (the term refers to positions that are almost hopelessly drawn with even only moderately skillful play, but I've won, and occasionally lost, positions that were generally considered dead drawn).

I can imagine that they would because some of them (GMs) are actually interested in getting at the truth. Ultimately, bodies like FIDE have to find accord with reality or be seen as irrelevant.

On the whole, I dislike arbiters having any involvement in games at least until asked. I can remember arbiters watching clocks in time scrambles, without being asked to do so. It should be up to the players to make win and draw claims. An arbiter can watch games without interfering, merely to validate claims but they shouldn't be making players' clock claims for them. I saw a BCF Chief Arbiter do that, several times. On another occasion I saw the same man make false claims against a spectator he accused of making noise (it was in fact another person) and on yet another, make exceedingly dodgy adjudication about whether a clock was or was not faulty. The flag had in fact dropped about 40 seconds early and the player involved was adjudicated to have lost on time. The flag was clearly faulty and the arbiter concerned judged that 40 seconds early was within the normal range of "faultiness".

If I'd have been running a tournament I certainly wouldn't have wanted him involved in it. Actually, I WAS running that tournament and I utterly regretted promising the players involved that I'd get a second opinion from this particular BCF Chief Arbiter, who over-ruled my own decision. Pompous fool, imo.

You really missed the point with the 5R and 75M rules which are fundamentally different from their 3R and 50M compatriots. Whether or not MAR's examples are classified as "dead" by the rules, they are effectively dead as it is impossible to reach a checkmate. Absolutely impossible. They will always run aground on the automated draw rules. Even when the players might potentially ignore the automated draw in the future - and a checkmate would follow, the checkmate would not count as clarified by the "expert"-answer on the first DP-query for which you posted the link!