That position is not an automatic draw because an engine has no way of detecting that there is no possibility of checkmate. All the engine sees is that there is still enough material on the board for one side to possibly win.
Chess rules
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??? The rules of chess are not based on what an engine can see, and what and engine cannot see. Insufficient material is just a special case of the impossibility of checkmate rule. Furthermore, engines are not used when playing games on chess.com. They just use a computer program, which by the way is not an engine. It's not necesairly a automatic draw, just one that can be declared. If their programming is so bad they can't detect impossibility of checkmate, their should be a button where you declare a draw by impossibility of checkmate to alert the staff to referee my game.
yeah, I never thought about that, but that is absolutely right
TheCunningMagician wrote:
They just use a computer program, which by the way is not an engine.
Um... that's sort of the definition of what an engine is. And yes, the rules of chess aren't based on what an engine can see, but the reality is engines can't see that the game is a draw in positions like those. And think about the logistics of the alternative that you're proposing (having staff manually end these kinds of games). Yes, these positions occur so rarely that it probably wouldn't take the staff a lot of effort to manually end the game each time it happens. However, if you have a button for these kinds of things, a lot of people will end up pressing it when the game actually isn't a draw, either because they don't understand the rules completely or because they're doing it intentionally even though they know the game isn't drawn. So if every time someone pressed the button a staff member had to personally review the game and see whether or not it is a legitimate draw, that would be a huge waste of human labor.
Does anyone know what rules of chess, chess.com goes by? I know it's not by FIDE rules because in FIDE rules impossibility of checkmate may be claimed as a draw. Consider the following position:
In a FIDE tournament, I could claim this as a draw. On chess.com, this is not a draw. On chess.com, not only is this not a draw, but I will probably get trolled for 50 moves. I do not understand why chess.com does not consider it a draw. Does anyone know of other rules chess.com has decided to do without? I just don't want to be screwed over the next time someone tries to pull a fast one on me. I looked at the "Learn to Play Chess" chess.com provided, but there is absolutely no sense of rigor in the rules of chess.