Abstract/Summary

In 1970, Thomas Ströhlein gained his doctorate with the thesis 'Research on Combinatorial Games'. This included a graph-theoretic definition of an algorithm for computing endgame tables for chess. The computation was carried out on the LRZ AEG TR4 computer in Munich. The results spanned KRk, KQk, KRkb, KRkn and the iconic 'hard endgame' KQkr, and included maximal depths (to conversion), lists of maximal-depth positions and optimal moves. Here, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this achievement and put his results in a broader context.