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H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Jun 23, 2020 09:16 AM UTC:

The Diagram does have a shuffle option now. But to make that work you should first place the pieces in some 'reference position', and then indicate in a shuffle option which piece types you want to permute. (It can then see the set of squares that should be involved in the shuffle.) Depending on whether the King has a castling move defined on it, the shuffle will respect its placement between the corner pieces during the shuffle, or not. In your case you have no castling, and there would be no restriction to the King placement.

In Chess960 the reference position would be FIDE; from this it would then know that the castling partners are Rooks, and that the King must remain between the Rooks. BTW, the Diagram does not implement Fischer castling; no way has been devised yet to indicate that in XBetza; the On notation would mean something else. Perhaps OX ? But as far as the shuffling is concerned, you could say shuffle=N!BRQK, where the exclamation point before the B indicates Bishops should be equally distributed over shades. When you ask it to do impossible things the results will be undefined.

I don't know whether this shuffle option satisfies your needs. A straightforward enhancement of it could be to allow multiple 'shuffle groups' (say comma separated in the shuffle option), where it would then apply the same shuffling as it does now to each group independently. (They had better be non-overlapping groups then, or the results would get statistical bias.)

And yes, your King move seems correct. But you should be able to see that in the XBetza sandbox, when you ask for the move diagram.

To see diagram source in a comment I usually click the 'View' link at the bottom of the comment to see it in isolation (so that I don't have to look for it on a page that contains lots of other stuff), and ask my browser to show the page source. There will still be a lot of stuff before it for the menu bar, and all the adds, but you can always use the browser search function to look for 'idiagram'.


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