Any chess position with 8 pieces on board and one pair of pawns has been solved

12 hours ago (mastodon.online)

The actual blogpost: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/op1-partial-8-piece-table...

I was initially confused about the scope; here are the specifics in case anyone else is too:

> The [new 63 TiB] tablebase covers those 8-piece positions that have at least one white and one black pawn that oppose one another, impeding each other’s path to promotion. We refer to such pawns as an opposing pair, and to positions that contain at least one opposing pair as op1.

On a related note, anyone knows a Mastodon proxy that doesn't require JS? Tried looking but couldn't find any good hosts.

Pretty cool. The opposing pawns does cut down on a lot of positions but this is a huge search space.