Check out Glinski's Hexagonal Chess, our featured variant for May, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Sam Trenholme wrote on Fri, Sep 25, 2009 08:43 PM EDT:
First of all, Greg, I’m really glad you’re working on ChessV again! It’s an excellent program and I’m very happy to make it available again (both 0.9.0 and 0.9.2). While not perfect—no project of this scope can ever be perfect—ChessV is a very ambitious program which plays a large number of chess variants on a few square boards (6x6, 6x8, 10x8, 12x8, and 10x10) quite well.

In terms of making an opening book, while it would be nice to do so with refined values of the pieces (as Greg pointed out, this can be done in ChessV 0.9.0, and my Schoolbook Zillions preset even has a ChessV save game file which one can easily modify with a text editor to tweak the value of the pieces), I’ve already done over half of the work to get a basic 15-node or so opening book for Schoolbook out there so two deterministic Chess engines can play each other a Schoolbook “showdown” and not just play the same game 15 times over.

It’s not a perfect opening book, but I’ve reviewed the openings by hand and I don’t see anything that doesn’t look reasonable. We can always make a better opening book later on, and even play some very fine chess with our imperfect opening book. Indeed, some very excellent Chess was made in the 19th century when openings like the Queen’s pawn opening and the Sicilian defense were considered inferior and very rarely used.

In terms of changing the Joker80 engine to choose from a greater range of possible moves in the opening, I think this is a good idea. I’ve always liked Zillions’ ability to make the move done from a given position more random and I also think it will make Joker80 a stronger Chess player.

I’m very glad to see some serious work being done to computer programs that play Chess and Chess variants competitively. Capablanca/Carrera/Bird Chess, in particular, results in some very sharp and tactical games that computers play very well, and it’s relatively easy to tweak an engine that can play FIDE Chess to play 10x8 Chess. There are dozens of possible opening positions for the pieces, and opening positions we thought in the mid-2000s were no good (positions with first-move mating threats and what not) may very well be OK, but one open question is whether there is any measurable White advantage to a setup where he can threaten mate on the first move.

One thing I would love to see is to have a Chess engine that can be told “Make a reasonable opening library for this particular opening setup”, run the program on a high-end machine for a could of days, and have it output a 1000-node or 2000-node opening book for the setup in question. It won’t be a perfect opening book, but it will be one we can use to research things like seeing how much of an edge White has with a given setup.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Schoolbook

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.