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Training puzzles: Mate in N vs Material advantage

Any advice on how to determine the difference between the two? Sometimes I will see an easy material advantage, but the puzzle will end up being a Mate in N puzzle, and vice versa.
Agreed, not vice versa. If you see a mate in N, why the heck would you go for the material instead?
That's a good point, let me explain. The puzzle will be a Mate in N, but I don't see the mate. All I see is a material advantage play, and it turns out to be incorrect. Does this help?
I'm not seeing a question here.

Mate is obviously much better than getting a bit of material, so it's no surprise it loses.
He's basically touching on a tricky problem with having puzzles that are simply designed to "find the best move." Sometimes there is a sequence that wins a queen, and one thinks "oh this is the best move." But if one looks deeper, there's actually a forced mate.

How to tell the difference isn't something easy to come by, it just takes raw calculation. Identifying forced mating sequences is a skill that is worthwhile, however. Maybe just treat every puzzle as though it's a mate-in-x and then if you can't find one, pick the move that wins the most material.

The ones that bug me the most (not necessarily saying on lichess, just in general) are the ones where there's a forced mate in 4 and you play it and it turns out there was a mate in 3, and it fails you outright. Stuff like that just bugs me.
Thanks static_shadow. I do agree that finding mate in 1 extra move and failing the puzzle is frustrating.
most chess puzzle books and programs I've seen would say white to play and mate in say 4 or it said white to play and win...
Agreed, I definitely feel that is the standard way puzzles are presented. As has been discussed in another thread, however, the way the puzzles are parsed from the database here, it might be tricky to determine that.

However, I think maybe a line of code that checks if it's a forced mate line and how many moves that forced mate line is would easily solve that issue. If the engine has a forced mate, display "mate in x" and if it doesn't have a forced mate line, just a very good material grab, then display "to play and win." Seems easy enough to add to the code maybe?
In a real game do you have something that tells you if it's a mate in N or material advantage position?

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