About this page

This is Nilatac's opening book. Nilatac is my suicide chess program. Leaf nodes (including leaves marked as lost) are solvable (by Nilatac) using a PN search of 2,000,000 nodes or less.

Credits

This page would not have been possible without help from:

• Ben Nye (angrim on FICS) for giving me countless worthy ideas that helped me optimize Nilatac, from endgame tables to alpha-beta to PN search. In particular, he helped me finish the proof for 1. e3 c6 (this particular line). This has literally saved me from insanity.
• Lenny Taelman (lenthep on FICS) for hosting a collection of suicide openings and a 4-piece endgame browser (sadly, those are no longer available); also for lending me the board images.
• Vladica Andrejic (AndrewTheAlmighty on FICS) for sharing his knowledge of openings with me and helping me solve some openings, in particular 1. e3 c6; for beating Nilatac a great number of times, thus giving me material to work with in improving Nilatac; and for asking to see Nilatac's proofs so many times, that I ended up writing this script to make the book browsable online :-)
• Mark Watkins of the University of Sydney for resuscitating interest in suicide chess and for sharing his proofs for 1. e3 Nc6 and the remaining three lines for 1. e3 b5.
• and, of course, Dennis Breuker and Victor Allis for inventing proof number search.

Links

• suicidechess.ca, a great compendium of suicide chess rules and strategy.
• A suicide chess review page written by AndrewTheAlmighty.
• The proof number search algorithm.