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mater
Mate searching program by Valentin Albillo
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README
Mater
Overview
Mater is a command line tool for searching mates in chess positions.
It has been written in Pascal by Valentin Albillo. You can find the original program here.
The program has been retouched by Roland Chastain. The command line for the retouched version is a little different and two errors have been fixed.
Usage
Mater expects at less two parameters: the position (in EPD format) and the moves number.
A third parameter can be used to change the search mode, so that only mates by consecutive checks are searched.
For example:
mater -position "3nn3/2p2p1k/1p1pp1p1/p2B3p/r2B2N1/7N/8/7K w KQkq -" -moves 12 -checkThe same example with short key names:
mater -p "3nn3/2p2p1k/1p1pp1p1/p2B3p/r2B2N1/7N/8/7K w KQkq -" -m 12 -cFor other options, please see here.
Examples
Here are eight problems coming from Mater original website. These problems are solved in the program demo.pas.
fpc -Mobjfpc -Sh demo.pasPosition 1
mater -p "b7/PP6/8/8/7K/6B1/6N1/4R1bk w - -" -m 3
Found mate in 3: b7a8nPosition 2
mater -p "8/8/1p5B/4p3/1p2k1P1/1P3n2/P4PB1/K2R4 w - -" -m 3
Found mate in 3: h6c1Position 3
mater -p "2N5/8/k2K4/8/p1PB4/P7/8/8 w - -" -m 4
Found mate in 4: d6c7Position 4
mater -p "rnbK2R1/p6p/p1kNpN1r/P3B1Q1/3P1p1p/5p2/5p1b/8 w - -" -m 4
Found mate in 4: g5g2Position 5
mater -p "8/1n2P2K/3p2p1/2p3pk/6pr/4ppr1/6p1/1b6 w - -" -m 3
Found mate in 3: h7g7Position 6
mater -p "4K1R1/PP2P3/2k5/3pP3/3B4/6P1/8/8 w - -" -m 3
Found mate in 3: b7b8rPosition 7
mater -p "8/2P1P1P1/3PkP2/8/4K3/8/8/8 w - -" -m 3
Found mate in 3: e7e8bPosition 8
mater -p "3nn3/2p2p1k/1p1pp1p1/p2B3p/r2B2N1/7N/8/7K w - -" -m 12 -c
Found mate in 12: h3g5Compilation
Mater is compiled with Free Pascal.
When Free Pascal is installed, you can use the following command to build Mater.
fpc -Mobjfpc -Sh -Fulibrary -Fulibrary/flre/src mater.pasYou can also use the following command.
makeHome
The new home page of Mater is here. The original page by V. Albillo can be seen on web.archive.org.
History
2021.11.06
- Fixed pawn move generation (missing pawn color in TestRecordPawn procedure)
2021.11.07
- Fixed demo data (solution for position 4)
2021.11.20
- Fixed conversion of square name to integer (bug introduced in the new version of the program, reported by F. Huber)
- Fixed en passant move generation (correction provided by F. Huber)

