H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 22, 2017 12:48 PM UTC:
Still to do: hexagonal variants, variants with drops, 3D variants, support for vector-graphics pieces, more sophisticated engine functions like opening books, endgame databases, and multi-threading, improving the scripting language for user-defined variants, functionality for running tournaments, etc ... Basically enough to last the rest of my life :)
Yeah, I know the problem. Life is just too short. And now there is AlphaZero, and we should perhaps learn to do things in an entirely different way...
What happened to Quaddrox? Did you integrate that in the new ChessV?
Implementing opening books is pretty easy; the problem is how to create them, in absence of huge databases of human quality games. A lot depends on your motivation for doing this at all: whether it is just the pleasure of doing it and the satisfaction of having created something wonderful all by yourself, or whether the main drive is to advance the state of the art of computer chess-variant programming as much as possible. In the latter case it makes sense to cooperate and standardize more. E.g. there seems little reason to develop a new opening-book format; Polyglot books, also used by WinBoard for all variants it supports, are an open format, and being able to interchange books seems a useful feature from the user perspective. For scripting user-defined variants a commonly accepted move notation, such as Betza's, seems a good way to do it. It is still on my to-do list to change the game-definitions of Fairy-Max to a more user-friendly format; perhaps we should cooperate on developing such a format. Sjaak II seems to do this pretty well, btw. EGT generation could be cast in the form of an engine that can be shared between GUIs just like search engines can. Implementing tournaments was surprisingly easy in WinBoard, if you already have the infra-structure for loading engines. It took me only about a week.
Yeah, I know the problem. Life is just too short. And now there is AlphaZero, and we should perhaps learn to do things in an entirely different way...
What happened to Quaddrox? Did you integrate that in the new ChessV?
Implementing opening books is pretty easy; the problem is how to create them, in absence of huge databases of human quality games. A lot depends on your motivation for doing this at all: whether it is just the pleasure of doing it and the satisfaction of having created something wonderful all by yourself, or whether the main drive is to advance the state of the art of computer chess-variant programming as much as possible. In the latter case it makes sense to cooperate and standardize more. E.g. there seems little reason to develop a new opening-book format; Polyglot books, also used by WinBoard for all variants it supports, are an open format, and being able to interchange books seems a useful feature from the user perspective. For scripting user-defined variants a commonly accepted move notation, such as Betza's, seems a good way to do it. It is still on my to-do list to change the game-definitions of Fairy-Max to a more user-friendly format; perhaps we should cooperate on developing such a format. Sjaak II seems to do this pretty well, btw. EGT generation could be cast in the form of an engine that can be shared between GUIs just like search engines can. Implementing tournaments was surprisingly easy in WinBoard, if you already have the infra-structure for loading engines. It took me only about a week.