Is this position a draw?

My engine says it is a win for White, but I believe it is a draw. I don't see how White can make progress. What do you think?

EDIT: It is Black to move.

I think you should play your engine and see if you can draw.

I have, and the evaluation doesn't change as the depth increases or as moves have been made, which is strange for a "winning" position, what I'm trying to find out is what humans think though. I think it's a draw. What do you think?

I think it's probably a win if a strong engine like Stockfish plays the white side. If I play the white side, it's probably a loss.

What engine are you using?

Play the engine against itself or another equally string engine and I think the result would be a draw.

EscherehcsE wrote:

I think you should play your engine and see if you can draw.

OK, will do. I'll run a Stockfish Dev 14090421 against itself at 1 minute a move. Should be interesting to see if there's a fortress somewhere in there.

Update - It's still going on...Most games are White wins...The first Stockfish Dev vs. Stockfish Dev game was a draw. However, the following two games were White wins. Also, I added a bit of contempt value for two more games as an experiment, and those two games were also White wins. Also, I set up a game of Komodo 5.1r2 (White) vs. Stockfish Dev (Black), and that game was also a White win. So, 1 draw and 5 white wins so far.

Final Update - 1 draw and 9 white wins.

How do I get engines to play each other? I have Stockfish 5 and Vitruvius and Komodo 5. also, that is interesting that 1 draw and 9 wins. so I guess it must be a win.

Some GUIs have engine tournament modes to handle that. Most often they're set up to alternate colors and play from opening books. Arena and I think Winboard are free ones that can do that, and there may be a few other free and commercial GUIs with that feature.

It's a little tougher if you want to do unusual things like start the games from certain positions and have a certain engine always take the same color.

The Shredder GUI makes it easy to do that if you only want to set up a match between two engines. You just create a pgn file with the position(s) you want the games to start with, then set up an engine match.

If you want the same engine to play itself, you can also do the same thing with the free Arena GUI by first setting up the position of interest on the board, then starting the Demo mode. (By right-clicking the Demo button, you can pick 1, 10, 50, or an infinite number of games.)

is the Shredder GUI free?

No, the Shredder GUI is commercial.

If you're playing two identical engines, or if you don't mind alternating colors for two different engines, you can do that in Arena. (With two different engines, you could simply alternate colors, then delete every other game in the pgn file.)