The 50 move rule shouldn't exist!

They should just give a time limitation to the whole game. Say u have 2 hours to finish the game, end of story. Forget even time control. If they fail to finish, it's a draw.

The 50 move should be replaced by a + or - 50 move rule... Positive indicates the game continues for 50 moves, while negative indicates immediate draw or loss for the side with higher material. The positive or negative thing can be determined by a coin toss. How about that?

In OTB blitz, moves are made very fast, so they don't even need a move limit. It might take only an hour to make a thousand moves, given a 5 sec increment. In regular chess, they should just say, "look if this game doesn't end by 11pm, then it's a draw. These are the games everyone wants to watch!

Well then you could always get at least a draw so long as you were White. Youl'd just have to think of something to occupy yourself for a couple of hours.

Why would I do that if I thought I could win? In that case I would just offer a draw, and if my opponent refused, then I would play on, hopefully win, and if not it would be a draw anyway so there's nothing lost.

But surely that's the point of a limit. If your flag falls you also lose even if you've won. 

Well that depend on the material left on the board. If he only has a king left, it's a guaranteed draw no matter what happens, and if time was so low it probably wouldn't take 50 moves to flag. You know how many won games I lost on time? I recently had a game where I had 3 queens and my opponent had 2 pieces and I didn't even physically have time to move the pieces. With 1.3 seconds, even premoves don't help that much. That's why my bullet rating is 11 something, but my blitz rating is in the 1500s. I just have to learn to speed up my play earlier on, so I have more time in the endgame. With increments, time isn't even an issue when you've won. In fact, u can just make random moves to boost your time 5 secs at a time until u stabalize at 30 seconds.

Well if you thought you could win and your opponent agreed with you you'ld probably be only drawing anyway. Youl'd only actually have a game when both players thought they could win and only up to the point where one of them changed his mind.

Both players have the right to keep trying, and both also have the right to offer or decline a draw.

And about the k move rule, some thought that if u made it 1000+ moves that it would imply endgames with even more pieces couldn't win. That's not necessarily true because if u have so many pieces (8...9...10...), some will "cancel out" in a sense, and if the position is so extreme, there will probably be even faster exchanges, simplifications, mates, or draws, so that;s not necessarily correct. It's an optimization problem. How many pieces and what combination gives the longest forced win.

You may have the right to keep trying, but you don't get the right to move before your opponent has made his move. If you ignore the time controls and just call it a draw after two hours if the game isn't finished then as soon as he gets worried your opponent can decide to hum Colonel Bogey instead of moving. Or am I missing something obvious?

U right, so there should be time control, but IN ADDITION, say the entire game must end in 2 hours, REGARDLESS of the time left. That solves the problem of move limits because the players could move faster or slower, and optimize their time by moving fast in obvious positions and taking more time in complicated ones.

Which is quite often the way friendly games finish anyway, usually with no formal time controls at all, just from external pressures. Large k-move rules would be of interest only to players who want to play these things out. But I think playing these things out is actually the spirit of chess and so large k-move values should be embodied in the basic rules.

Probably the main effect at the moment would be that certain chess GUIs would no longer stop as soon as you hit the 50 move rule. Tarrasch does this so if I want to practice long endings against Stockfish (at the moment). I have to set up the position again to continue. 

Getting rid of any rule of the sort would really be bad. If you look at the Kempsinski Epishin game I mentioned earlier it could well have come down to who ran out of tine first. If that had been Kepsinski it would have been a travesty because Epishin was clearly getting nowhere (in the event he walked into a stalemate anyway, so both types of control became irrelevant).

They should have a setting on chess programs where u can deactivate the 50 move rule, or even set an alarm where it tells you when you reach your personal move limit, like when you're practicing long mats..etc.

Well mostly I practice these against Wilhelm with the relevant EGTBs attached. Wilhelm allows you to set whatever value you want before you start. But it's also useful to practice against an unaided program and Wilhelm is unfortunately pretty useless at KNNKP in particular if left to his own devices, hence Tarrasch. 

What's the algorithm for King and 2 knights vs Pawn. I'm going to learn it.

This could be an optimistic question.

The only published complete algorithms are DTM and DTZ50 EGTBs (and I think that a DTM50 EGTB has been constructed but not published for this particular ending). The associated rules are very simple (and could very easily be simplified further) but the demands on the memory are probably too great for most, if not all, people. (Also you would probably need to write some software if you want these in human readable form.)

I'm working on a more human friendly complete algorithm but it's still quite a long way off, and, at least at first draft it's not looking for optimality.

The most you can probably get otherwise, as far as I know, is the supplement to Troitzky's "Chess studies". I think it's about 200 pages. It's not complete, but it covers much of the methods for White to win. I got the book to find out if he ever stated "the Troitzky line rule". I've only skimmed the pages because I'm looking at the problem myself and the quickest way to ruin a good puzzle is to look at the answer. I did however notice that at one point he has omitted rather a large part of the analysis "for fear of tiring the reader". In any case it doesn't cover methods for Black to win. (These, in all but a handful of rather unlikely positions, terminate outside of the KNNKP endgame proper, a pawn promotion being required.)

As an aside, I don't think Troitzky did ever enunciate the Troitzky line rule which is not totally correct in any of its manifestations, though he may have enunciated a different (correct) rule involving the line.

About 70% of the positions are drawn, the remainder splitting roughly 3:1 as White wins:Black wins (where I've assumed White has the knights). Black can obviously not win if White can prevent the promotion of the pawn (apart from the handful of positions mentioned previously), but even if he cannot 38% of the resulting positions are drawn so long as he has retained the knights, and in many cases White wins either one or (on promotion to knight only) two moves after promotion.

To produce an algorithm for the endgame you need, algorithms for each of the possible conversions, though in practice you can ignore KNNB and KNNR and some of the possible conversions have very simple algorithms e.g. KNNK discussed earlier, not to mention KNK. The most difficult case is KNNKQ where Black may require 72 moves to win after promotion and either player can very easily drop a half point during play.

I don't understand all of your notation? Could you explain what endgames the letters represent

The first K represents the white king. The subsequent letters preceding the socond K represent the white pieces. The second K represents the black king and the remaining letters the black pieces. Letters as in game notation. The positions of the pieces remain unspecified; the string represents all possible positions with the given pieces.

So KNNKP would represent two knights v pawn, it being understood that nobody (except the players) gives a monkeys who has the knights and who has the pawn.

KNK would represent king and knight v king. Since that is already a dead position the algorithm is very simple - you can go to the pub.