Comments by HGMuller

Well, I am not sure if you will be able to run GNU Shogi. The DemoPack was
made on a now-deceased PC running Win2k. I downloaded it on my WinXP
laptop, and the GNU-Shogi executable does not want to run there. It
crashes immediately, even if I try to directly run the executable, without
WinBoard. If I run it from a command-prompt box, so that I can see the error
message, it complains about an incompatible cygwin1.dll.

So I guess the cygwin1.dll that my current system has loaded is no longer
compatible with the GNU Shogi executable. The DemoPack does contain a
cygwin1.dll that is compatibl with GNU Shogi, butit cannot load if another
cygwin1.dll is already in use.

If you don't run cygwin on your PC, or otherwise can lay your hands on a
GNU Shogi that runs on your PC, it should run with the WinBoard and
InBetween settings in the DemoPack.

Yes, I understand what you meant by FEN for movement, but it sounds
rediculous. Especially since there are already plenty of standards for
move notation (with limited scope, e.g. Chess), that do have sensibla
names. Like SAN = Standard Algebraic Notation.

I understand that you don't mind that the mve notation would make use of
knowledge of the rules of the variant. This does imply that the same move
could have different notation in different variants (because in one
variant the move would need extra info to disambiguate it, while in others
it would not (e.g. promotion to Q in Shatranj, if Ferz is represented by Q,
would be implied, while in Chess there woud be a choice.)

I am not sure if you could call something a universal standard if it would
need knowledge of the rules of the variant to define the meaning. If it was
allowed to draw on the rules of the variant, such a system is likely to
degenerate to the union of the most-convenient notations for each variant.
In Chess an Alfil jumps without capturing the piece it jumps over, in
checkers a jump implies a capture. I guess the most important part of the
standard would not be how you can describe mutations to th board, but in
stead when you have to do it, and when you have to omit it. If you would
indicate a drop with '@', as in SAN (e.g. N@e4), in Go the fact the
piece type as well as the fact that it is a drop would be implied, and
there would no reason to include tem in the notation. So Go moves simply
become the indicator for the cell where you drop, everything else could be
implied.

If it is allowedto use knowledge about the game when interpreting the
moves, the need for many delimters disappears. Why separate the FromSquare
and ToSquare by a hyphen? You could simply concatenate the square
coordinates if it their syntax is known. a character behind that could
indicate the new state of the target cell, if different from the state of
the source cell 9as with promotions). Only non-implied side-effects would
hav to be described. e1g1 would still be a perfect notaton for castling,
as the Rook move is fully implied by it.

I agree. Draws are a good thing in a game. Without them, it becomes a
lottery. A draw percentage of 30 between equal-strength players is
entirely acceptable.

It must not be much more than that, though. In Shatranj about 70% of all
games between equal players seems to end in a draw, and that is one aspect
that makes it very boring.

I would add Elephants to that list. I don't mind the Xiangqi Horse being represented by a normal Knight (although for experienced Chess players the difference between the two is the biggest stmbling block for playing Xiangqi). But I am not sho charmed by the representation of an Elephant by an ordinary Bishop.

As I pointed out elsewhere, most of the pieces you mention are quite easy to make from a normal Staunton Chess set. I am not sure what you mean by 'Vizers', but I assume you mean the pieces next to the Xiangqi royal piece. They could be decapitated King and Queen of a normal set. (I don't think the 'head' they have here in the photograph, somewhat reminiscent of an old-fashioned coal can, adds much esthetical value.) The Queen's head could then be glued on top of a Knight, (after grinding off the ears), to make an Amazon. The upper part of the other Knight could be glued on top of an inverted Rook to make a Chancellor. A V-shaped cut in the Bishop's head (making use of one of the cut that is aready there)could remove the top of the Bishop, and make it an ArchBishop.

When done carefully, all this would provide high-quality pieces that blend in perfectly with the normal Chess set they were made from, and starting from two equal sets would automatically supplement the number Pawns you ned for wider boards. You would actually have a surplus of Pawns, and a Pawn glued on top of a Knight's base could be another general-purpose piece. (Unfortunately you can't make a pair of those, if you use the other Knight for building an Amazon.)

Biggest problem are Cannons and Elephants. The Cannon's could be made from Knight's bases plus some parts specally manufactured for the purpose. To make something that remotely looks like an Elephant, even in an abstract sense, is a problem in itself.

If we would really want to sell such pieces through this website, the best way might be to strike a deal with a manufacturer of normal Chess sets, to order pieces or piece parts individually, so that we are not limited to the frequencies (or sizes!) with which they occur in normal Chess sets. We could then, for example, use a Bishop of a larger size to convert to Archbishop, and we could buy the Knight heads and bases separately. Unlike plastic pieces, wooden pieces are manufactured completely independently, and not having to assemble the Knights only saves the manufacturer money.

I have looked at retail prices of wooden Chess sets, and some acceptable sets are already sold on the internet for €16,90. (I could even find sets for €7,99 in the toy shop, but they are of ugly design and rather smal size.) This amounts to ~50 cents per piece. In general, a manufacturer should be happy to sell his products for the retail price.

I have started play-testing the Grasshopper, and first indications are that
it is an exceedingly weak piece. One has to be careful, though, not to start
from a normal western opening position, with a full back-rank of Pieces
behind a cosed rank of Pawns. If some of the pieces are Grasshoppers, this
is not a quiet position, but highly tactical. E.g., if you replace the
Knights of white by Grasshoppers, white starts with 1. Gb3, with an
immedite fork on Nb8 and Ng8, so that white has at least a Knight for its
first Grasshopper. If two Grasshoppers replace white Bishops, black even
has to give a Rook for a Grasshopper!

All this initial Grasshopper tactics can be avoided by moving the pawns
one rank forward. In this case no immediate forks are possible to exchange
the Grasshopper from scratch against something stronger, and they have to
prove their intrinsic worth. Which is very low: replacing both Bishops or
both Knights of a FIDE piece set with two Grasshoppers leads to 86%-88%
losses for the Grasshoppers.

I am trying now replacing only one Knight or Bishop by two Grasshoppers.
(The empty rank between Pieces and Pawns offers a natural possibility to
start with more than 8 Pieces, in a Shogi-style array.)

Play-testing shows that in real games, the Grasshopper is a quite weak piece. Starting from a setup

r n b q k b n r
. g . . . . g .
p p p p p p p p
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
P P P P P P P P
. G . . . . G .
R N B Q K B N R

to prevent that a Grasshopper has immediate forks on opponent back-rank pieces, and thus cn be traded for something more valuable, it turns out that deleting the Grasshoppers of one side, and a single Knight on the other side, leads on average to a light victory of the Grasshoppers, while deleting a single Bishop in stead of a Knight resuts in a light advantage of the side with the Bishop pair.

If we adopt the Larry-Kaufman values of the normal Chess pieces (B = N = 325, B-pair bonus = 50), this would make the opening value of a Grasshopper in a normal Chess context ~175 cP. Hardly more than a Ferz (which has a value of ~150 cP), and probably even less in the end-game.

As to the economy of the operation: From a single normal Chess set ($30 if you buy them
in 4+ quantities), you can manufacture two Capablanca supplements (Chancellor, Archbishop,
and 2 Pawns), after which you are left with 2 Knight bases, 2 Bishop bodies, 4 Pawns, and
K and Q heads. The latter can be combined with the Bishop bodies, to make 'mini' Queens,
which can be used as Advisers in Xiangqi, and mini Kings, which can be Commoners for Knightmate.
Making 4 Capablanca supplements produces 2 Advisors, and a separate Chess set is needed to
provide the Rooks for making Cannons (using 2 of the 8 superfluous Pawns as bases).
Two other Pawns go on top of 2 of the 4 Knight bases left over from the Cancellor production.
These 'giant' Pawns can be used as Xiangqi Elephants.

The 4 Capabanca supplements also leave 2 mini Kings, and one of the Knights of the
third set can be put on top of another Knight base to make a Royal Knight. This completes
a Knightmate set.

An alternative would be to scrap the mini Queens, and play Xiangqi with normal Queens for
the Advisers. The set that provided the Cannon material can also provide an unmolested Queen.
The two Queen heads left over from the Capablanca sets could then be used to turn the
Knights of the third set into Amazons.

So from 3 Chess sets ($90), you woud make:
4 Capabanca supplements (Chancellor + Archbishop + 2 Panws) ($16?)
1 Xiangqi supplement (Queen + 2 Cannons + 2 Elephants) ($20)
1 Knightmate supplement (King + Royal Knight) ($10)
1 Amazon ($3)
2 mini Kings ($5 the pair)
2 spare Bishops
12 spare Pawns

Sorry about the 'serial posting'. I thought it would be a worthwile
addition to have a picture of a high-quality piece set, which is quite easy to make, for some of the more important variants, (Xiangqi, Shatranj, Knightmate, Capablanca, Janus, Courier. So I posted such a picture in he comments to these variants, so that people will easily find it.

The only tools needed to make these Staunton-style representations of
Amazon, Chancellor, Archbishop, Commoner, Cannon, Ferz, Alfil and Royal
Knight is a not-too-course saw and some glue. and of course a sufficient
number of identical wooden piece sets to provide the raw material.

When done carefully, the quality of all the new pieces will be as high as
that of the original pieces. And with erfect unity of style. Perhaps I shuold write a separate page in the 'crafts' section as well.

What do you mean by Xiangqi being 'technical'? Are you referring to the horrendously complicated rules to decide if repetitions are drawn or lost?

I don't think Xiangqi is any less drawish by nature than Chess. It is true that a Queen is stronger than the Rooks, which are the strongest pieces in Xiangqi. But the royal piece of Xiangqi (a Wazir) is also a lot weaker than the King in Chess. And it is constrained to the Palace on top of that. This makes that a Knight is often enough to perform a perpetual.

The fact that it never happens is only due to the rule that you lose when you do it. It would be easy enough to add a similar rule in Chess. I am not sure that it would help much, though: not many games end in a Queen ending. The usual draw occurs because there simply is not enough material difference left at the end to force a win.

In fact I am surprised that this should not happen in Xiangqi, as most material is completely useless in an end-game. I read a complaint recently on the Talkchess forum that NeuChess, one of the best Xiangqi programs in existence, was not able to beat itself when playing with 20-py search against 18-ply search (which in Chess would cause a crushing defeat), because all games ended in 'draw due to insufficient mating material'.

Btw, the draw percentage in Capablanca-type variants is usually only half of that in normal Chess (15% vs 30%). With Superchess, Dutch-Open rules (featuring an Amazon and Centaur in addition to the Capablanca pieces) it is even lower. The more strong pieces, the larger the probabilities for a quick mate, or devastating tactice.

I would be more interested to get Zillions to work with a GUI (any GUI at
all, anything that would make it communicate its moe with the outside
World according to a public protocol). After that it would simply be a
matter of interfacing the GUI to the GC server.

I think it is a bad idea to interface an AI directly with a server,
without a GUI in between. It would be very inconvenient when you wanted to
ply two different engines against each other if you had to do it through
the server, for instance.

Using the Kaufman value N=325 (centiPawn), this means that Cannon = 320. This makes it appreciably
stronger than the other well-known hopper, the Grasshopper, which has a value of 175 cP.

You are right about the mating potential of C+N and C+F. I adapted my tablebase generator to handle
a Cannon. The mate with C+F apparently can only be enforced in te corner of the Ferz color,
and it migt take 59 moves to drive the bare King there. Cannon + Wazir is also a general win,
and goes slightly faster, as the mate can be performed in any corner (41 moves max).
Cannon+Knight is easy by comparizon: only 30 moves. With Cannon+Alfil it is almost always draw.
There are some mating sequences, though (0.5% with wtm, 0.1% btm). The longest takes 13 moves:
White: Kd6, Cc5, Aa7; black: Ka1 (wtm).

Staunton-style Cannon

I have a question about Game Courier: is this pubicly available software, as opposed to private or commercial?


In particular: if we wanted to set up a way for people to play Superchess
against each other on the Superchess.nl website, would it be allowed to
use Game Courier for this? Would that be technically feasible, and what
are the requirements on the server? (i.e. which sofware packages should be
supported? Only PHP?)

What you propose for the mouse pointing is pretty much the algorithm WinBoard uses as well. An extra that you might to implement as well is that if you click a second time on the highlighted square, you de-select it again.