Comments by catugo
Actually as TCEC, the 10th season, is currently on (at the time of me writting this comment stage 1 is approaching it's end). During it I though at an alternative to the many openings of the initial setup :)! In priciple you start the game with regular pieces but with an material imbalance, which in the classic point count 1,3,3,5,9 is balanced. I though one side should always start with exactly 2 or exactly 4 bishops for keeping pair. An example would be replacing the queenside rook with a knight and add 2 pawns for that side on the the central files (if white add pawns on d3&e3). I came up with 20-30 (have not exactly counted) such examples. What do you guys think about such orthodox chess tournaments? Of course there should be a double round robin comeptition where 2 engines play the positions in reverse for example if in the above example (assuming a competition for say 20 engines) stockfish plays white with NPP for r, then in round 20 (the away round if you'd lie) then stockfish play black with r for NPP. The crux of this is that no extra programming should be done :). It's just you have to create other initial positions :)!
HG,
Would you be able to also organize an Alapca chess tournament if you can arrange a seiwaran chess one? I'm quite sure no engine has implemented the move of the alapca (in Betza WmD) but it should be easy :)! I find it a more interesting game, Seiwaran quickly becomes very tactical :)!
While playing herculean chess against sxg, I camed across the following question. At which board size if any a plain zebra (no enhancements) becomes equal or stronger than a plain knight (no enhancements). On 8x8 a zebra borders on uselessness, on 10x10 is pretty weak but on 12x12 seems ok, I guess still weaker, as it has more outside the board jumps and also is a bit more akward (it triangulates worse). But as you enlarge the board speed becomes an significant advantage. Also if the case of only one square away attacking pawns (like the orthodox ones, or berolinas) the zebra may attack behind pawn lines, this can also be small opening advantage. Also I think that WZ or FZ will gain even faster on the WN and FN as the one-steps help combat akwardness :)! (FZ seems weaker as ferz squares can be reached by 2 zebra moves anyway :) ). Moreover in this last case the LW should be somwhere in between but as LF is colour bound we'd better not include it in this calculation :)!
Refusal Chess. Refuse your opponent to make certain moves. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]It would be spamming to post my moves here, maybe I can make an account!
Hexmate. A two-player variant on a hex board made up of 127, 3-color hexagons. (Cells: 127) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I don't understand how pawn capture, it is clear how they move, but not how they capture :)!
That would have been my first guess indeed, thanks! :)
Refusal Chess. Refuse your opponent to make certain moves. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Actually I forgot, but I'm happy with the way things turned out. Also I play many, many games now on game courier so that's that. Moreover I'm guessing that you are stronger than me HG in regular chess as I am a very poor calculator, although my strategy is ok, not brilliant but ok. But I honestly, and I hope I don't disturb you in any way V., don't understand how you would properly play refusal chess with an engine that was not specifically designed to do that. I'd like to reiterate my belief that this is not difficult to do, but it is still a thing "to do". I'm more concerned about making the game work as the idea is very good but not polished. I hope your game could shed som light on that, too :)!
Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]@Fergus,
Hello,
I apologize for bugging you all the time, but the Jetan preset seems to be broken :)! Could you offer some help?
Refusal Chess. Refuse your opponent to make certain moves. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Good luck to all competitors! I believe HG to be clever enough to come up with the trick I came up and beat the computer, as it is not build for such games :)!
What happens here, nobody cares about this topic, or no one is confident enough to venture an answer, or am I just planely impacient :)?
Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Once again Fergus, a warm thank you is in order :)!
The plain zebra part was more a theoretical question. In my variants I don't use plain leapers, but I think it is useful to think about them in order to see their contribution :)!
King. Royal piece moving one in arbitrary direction.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I think this discussion relates a bit to my zebra vs knight with increased board size question, as has the same element of a longer leaped piece versus a shorted leaped piece (the man is actually a stepper rather that a leaper). But there is a key difference. The man move is much more fluid that that of the knight which helps a lot with things like pawn defense. In a way the knight has a more fluid move that the zebra but there are probably rather rarer situations when this comes in front :)! On the other hand the man speed is roughly half of the knights speed, where the zebra has 3/2 of the speed of the knight :)!
Jetan. Martian Chess, coming from the book The Chessmen of Mars. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Any idea about piece values int this game :)?
King. Royal piece moving one in arbitrary direction.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]@Kevin & @HG
I hope you 2 guys are not bothered by me inserting myself into your little talk. For Kevin, I'd like to help answer the last question about the sample size of 1000%. One problem, as always in statistics is if the sample is representative (in principle I think that is your main concern), if so HG has a neat formula for the error taken from physics I guess. The point to be taken for there was that the error decreases by the square root of 2 function meaning you have to quadruple sample size in order to half the error. Still there is the concern of representative sample. At first glance, and it could be sufficient ,the distribution of reasonable situations is rather constant. Even if situations are not constant through the course of games (meaning in average you exchange rooks rather later than minor pieces in an very orthodox like variant) , they are probably very alike in between games. There are probably effects of what Ralph Betza calls sociability (an example would be Fergus's observation about his own Gross Chess that knights cooperate better with vaos) meaning so me pieces have better relationships with each other. Unless very weird cases these effects are likely to be small! Point of whole of this is not to make an truthfully scientific enquirement because that is very difficult but rather to argue that such samples are mostly representative. If they are not you are basically screwed.
I think there is some small friction between the two of you, and maybe I'll post myself somewhere in between, although probably a bit close to HG's take :)! I see HG experimental method more as a tool rather than the answer and I'm confident you do, too HG, as you enquirement about short range leapers on and 8x8 board ended up in a formula :)! On the other hand the mathematician in me does feel the need for explanations of the empiric data. There principles like the ones postulated by Ralph Betza in his essays on piece values (I'm sure you know what I'm talking about so I won't insist) come into play. In my knight vs zebra context on increasingly larger boards the knight has better mobility (due to less of the board jumps), and the zebra has better speed (due to longer jumps). When thinking about a basic formula I don't think it should be that difficult to come up with. It probably is enough to count how many moves a knight and respectively a zebra needs to get from A to B on boards of various sizes starting with 8x8 and ending with say 20x20. That it is not hard to do, maybe tomorrow I'll get the courage. I certainly hope so. But in real variants there is more to take into account than simple triangulation like relations with pawns, checkmating power with another specific minor piece . Here is where HG's statistical method comes into play. But even so for each variant, interpretations may be given.
PS Actually practical questions are allways more difficult the ZvsN theorethical one is not that hard eventually. But the practical problem on what to use in a computer program (hopefully not in a long time I'll go back to Greg's chessV) for the value of the joker in each of the 2 apothecary games is a pretty nasty one :)! Cheers everybody, I hope I have not bored you :(!
@Kevin
Why not try something like Elephant+Silver General and Dababah+GoldGeneral? They seem like nice pieces :)! You may even try but I think is worse Gold elephant and silver dababah.
Refusal Chess. Refuse your opponent to make certain moves. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]It is not clear what you mean with 3. (refuse)... Nf6 . Was the knight move a white move or a black move?
Actually I have noticed the "camel annoyance" you mention (it also applies to zebras), during my design of apothecary chess 1 & apothecary chess 2, on an even a deeper board. That is the reason why I have introduced the bruhaha squares. I think to some degree this annoyance (caused by the long jump relative to the distance of opposing armies, and the rather low value of such pieces) is present on the H move of the frog (even more so because the board is 8 deep).
Personally I always though Grand Chess, and by extension Capablanca chess family games, lacks minor pieces. Maybe it could be interesting to keep the NR&NB from capablanca and place the frogs on back bruhaha squares somewhere. I don't see how that would meet your design goals :)!
I'd like to ask the community. Are there any other such examples of "camel annoyance". What other ways are to combat it?
Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Hello,
I am playing a game of musketter chess where I am black. When it camed to place my 2 extra pieces on the "fake" back rank i could not. The error was something like cannot include chess3 (I am not quoting). I tried several comands but the proper one seems to be h e5-g9; s d5-e9; It does not work :(!
Could someone help me?
Game Courier Developer's Guide. Learn how to design and program Chess variants for Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]@Fergus
Hello,
I did deleted the wrong logs. Could you tell me if and when will I be able to play?
If I'm permitted to drop into this discussion my take with the concept of valuing pieces in terms of pawns is like the economical concept of valuing products in terms of coin. This means that the concept of a pawn is an abstract concept of measure unit (if 1 coin is not very comfortable just think about 1 meter). So the sentence "A knight worths 3 pawns" does not actually mean that one may always exchange a knight for 3 pawns, although in most cases on average that is the case. It actually means that it worths 3 somethings (like coins or meters), where one pawn (unit of measure) indeed on average worth one pawn (the chess piece). I think a more basic way to state what HG is saying is that especially in the case of the pawn: a pawn rarely worth a pawn (if you get my joke :)!). I many times think that this measurement scale is not linear like in the 7n vs 3q example, it could be even multidimensional in some weird games where 2 types of pieces are extremely sociable towards each other (I can give no hypothetic example now so if one could help here) .
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@HG Muller,
You have said in another thread that you are broadcasting all computer games (or at least you did so in the past), you may probably do in the future, although you have just said that not in the near future :). My question : what exactly are you broadcasting :)!