[shasta]

Interesting anecdote, but my guess is that your last sentence is an incorrect assessment of what was going on. Chess engines almost all perform a min/max search on the game tree to bounded depth with static evaluation used to evaluate the leaves of the search. My guess is that what was going on is that the really bad moves weren't noticed to be really bad because it assumed the opponent wasn't going to capitalize on the mistake. It seems implausible to me that the engine was somehow able to look ahead to the end game and figure out that the only way to win at misere chess is to be winning going in to the end game.