H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Dec 23, 2017 10:41 PM UTC:
OK, good plan. For after the holidays. I will just conclude here with the observation that the ChessV approach is not that different from what I do in WinBoard. There 'engine-defined variants' also must mention a 'parent variant', from which they inherit the rules. It is just that developments after that have made it possible to define more and more aspects of the rules from scratch, leaving less and less to be necessarily inherited from the parent. Apart from board size and initial setup, the piece-to-char table made it possible to arbitrarily alter the participating pieces, and whether these have Shogi-like promotions, and to what they then promote. Piece commands made it possible to assign arbitrary moves to each piece image, extensions to FEN made it possible to specify different kinds of shuffling, defining a holdings size can add drops to any variant, and the piece-to-char table can specify how pieces demote on capture. So the number of parent variants that is really needed gets smaller and smaller, as they become more flexible.
OK, good plan. For after the holidays. I will just conclude here with the observation that the ChessV approach is not that different from what I do in WinBoard. There 'engine-defined variants' also must mention a 'parent variant', from which they inherit the rules. It is just that developments after that have made it possible to define more and more aspects of the rules from scratch, leaving less and less to be necessarily inherited from the parent. Apart from board size and initial setup, the piece-to-char table made it possible to arbitrarily alter the participating pieces, and whether these have Shogi-like promotions, and to what they then promote. Piece commands made it possible to assign arbitrary moves to each piece image, extensions to FEN made it possible to specify different kinds of shuffling, defining a holdings size can add drops to any variant, and the piece-to-char table can specify how pieces demote on capture. So the number of parent variants that is really needed gets smaller and smaller, as they become more flexible.