Don't know about 2) but for 1):
1 second probably is too little for the engine to go deep enough to find a move-order resulting in a mate. I tried it on my phone with activated "Ponder" and Stockfish found a mate against itself relatively quickly.
It's not easy to do though. If you don't remember the exact algorithm even GMs under time-pressure can fail it. (There was a relatively recent threat about that exact thing occuring to a WGM on a tournament)
Yes you need a database. You can download an excellent free one based on the TWIC (This Week in Chess) PGN collection in the "Free Chess Software" section of my website:
Nice little website MJ4H, thanks.
You're welcome.
@Xilmi: I switched to single-PV mode and increased the time to 5 seconds. Now Stockfish found a mate in 16 very easily. Thanks!
@MJ4H: I am downloading the PGN collection right now. It includes a lot of games so i takes a while though. What excactly am i downloading? A huge bunch of PGNs? What do I do to "add" it to Scid? Thanks for the tip anyway!
There are two versions on the website, the PGN version and the version that is already in SCID format. I recommend the SCID format version if you are using SCID.
Just unzip the files into a directory of your choice, and open the ".si4" file using SCID. This open up the database of 1.3+ million games in SCID. The list of games should show up in the game list window at that point.
If you downloaded the PGN format database you will have to create a new database in SCID and import the PGN into that database. That will take much longer, but you can still do it.
I have just downloaded the Scid chess database application. It included three different engines, but i downloaded and installed Stockfish 3 as well.
Now I have two questions:
1) When I made Stockfish play verses itself (1 sec per move), it ended with a (black) king vs. a king, a bishop and a knight. Stockfish did not manage to mate black, no matter how long I made it think for each move. At the same time it said white had an advantage of 700 (pawn-units) or something like that. Is such an endgame impossible to win, or is this a weakness of Stockfish 3?
2) It looks like Scid has a feature where I can search find similar games. But when I search for games, it will not find any, even though i search for simple positions where only one move is done. Do I have to download a database or something? If yes, any recommendations? How do I install those?