Problem 37292: psychedelic aliens reversed

[revenant]

LOL, the initial position looks like it's black to play! Here's the FEN if it were so you can paste it into your chess engine:

8/8/1P3r2/1r6/p7/k2p1P2/2R4p/1RK5 b - - 0 1

I tried to pick up the b5 black rook to capture the b1 white rook with check, and the interface sliced out a section of the board and let me drag it all over the screen.  Psychedelic.  I was mightily confused until I saw the white "player to move" indicator in the upper  left corner of the screen.  Richard, what happens on your test platform when a human tries to move the wrong color piece?  Firefox seems to think the black rook is a draggable document.  Can the Java be made foolproof?  (The fool being me.)

Crafty 22.0 confirms that 1... Rxb1+ would achieve mate in 6:

a) 2. Kxb1 h1=Q+ 3. Rf8 Rxb6+ 4. Ka1 Qxf8#

b) 2. Kd2 dxc2 3. Kd3 c1=Q 4. Ke2 h1=Q 5. Kd3 Qxf3+ 6. Kd4 Qcc3#

That last position looks like a scary scene from "Aliens".

Anybody know of any compositions where the board and player to move could be reversed and there would be a mate in the same number of moves?

[drahacikfm]

The wild 5 chess variant on ICC might interest you, revenant.  It looks just like the normal starting position of a normal chess game.  But White's pawns are all on the 7th rank and his pieces on the 8th rank!  So all his pawns are one move away from queening, but blocked by his pieces!  It's White's to move, and I think it's been worked out to a forced win.  The first move is 1. Nb8-c6 theatening 2.Ne5 and 3.Nd3 smothered mate!!  Also of course "threatening" 2.b7-b8=Q

People who get duped into a wild 5 game for the first time keep trying to move a pawn on the first move, and can't, and lose on time!  Or they think they are Black, because the Black pieces are on their side of the board, and they wait for White to move and they lose on time because they are White 

[revenant]

Those wild variants and bughouse are fun to watch others play.  It's beyond me how they can come back and play normal chess afterward.  :-)

Here on Chess Tempo, where problems can be black to play or white to play on any given problem, I often wind up trying to checkmate the wrong king.  Kind of like not knowing your left from your right.

[richard]

Hey revenant,

I hadn't noticed this before, very freaky.  I believe this is a  FF3 "feature" as I can't reproduce it on FF2, it certainly is a bit freaky :-) Dragging is disabled for the wrong colour pieces but it appears that FF3 has captured the background image of the square (on FF3 the piece images are implemented as background images for each square) and is attempting to treat it as a document, why it has also captured a couple of the other squares (and I see no pattern as to which squares it captures) is a mystery to me.  I believe this is probably a bug in the underyling javascript drag and drop library I'm using that is specific to FF3, I'll see if there is any workarounds I can use.

Regards,
Richard.

[slacker00]

Those wild variants and bughouse are fun to watch others play.  It's beyond me how they can come back and play normal chess afterward.  :-)

Here on Chess Tempo, where problems can be black to play or white to play on any given problem, I often wind up trying to checkmate the wrong king.  Kind of like not knowing your left from your right.

I used to play those wild variants on ICC back in the day.  My favorite was finding a very weak opponent and giving "Queen odds".  Somehow beating someone without my queen gave me satisfaction. lol

As for trying to checkmate one's own king, I was kinda doing that for a while.  Now, when the position loads, I go through a certain ritual.  First I look to see which side is next to move, then I count down all of the pieces to see if there is a material equality.  From there, I am usually pretty comfortable examining the simple tactical themes present in the position, then mixing & matching the themes as I try different continuations until I find the answer.  It seems to work for me.