> interesting, it may be able to reduce the space -- when one sides peice count exceeds the other, a win (or bad play) could be assumed or proven Chess engines

> interesting, it may be able to reduce the space -- when one sides peice count exceeds the other, a win (or bad play) could be assumed or proven Chess engines already do this, just with much much better heuristics than counting number of pieces. > that might reduce the search space enough to find an optimal play through to the start game... Sorry, no.