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H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 05:46 PM UTC:

ShaMax and Fairy-Max use the same fmax.ini file, so the automatically play each other's variants. But the search engine of ShaMax is altered to score stalemated as a loss (actually by deleting the code that makes an exception for it and scores it as a draw), and score a bare opponent King as a win.

If I understood the description correctly, you would not need that for Makruk, and it might lead to some really stupid mistakes in the late end-game. (For the rest of the game you would not notice the difference.)

The promotion on 6th is a problem for Fairy-Max. The only way around this I see at the moment is that you would perform the promotion by hand, by using 'Edit Position' in stead of doing your move, or using Edit Position after Fary-Max' move. Pawns on 6th already get a bonus in Fairy-Max, so it might also strive for promotions and resist yours. The bonus is not very high, though: to have it play Shatranj better, I devide the bonuses for normal Chess that were originally hard-coded in the program by 8 if the value of the piece you promote to is less than 250. In Chess you get 64 for a Pawn on 6th, and 128 for a Pawn on 7th. So that would be reduced to 8 and 16, not very much. But in Shatranj (and presumably Makruk) a 'Queen' is of course hardly worth more than a Pawn. So it might not hurt too much, sacrificing a Pawn to make another promote is probably always wrong anyway, so a large bonus is not really needed.

The problem with using Edit Position is that WinBoard considers what you play afterwards as a new game, so you cannot save the entire game if you do that. If there is much interest, I could of course make a dedicated version of Fairy-Max for playing Makruk, which promotes at 6th rank, just like I made ShaMax for Shatranj (micro-Makrux?).

Fairy-Max is indeed an amazingly tough opponent, for an IA of only ~100 lines of code. I guess that tells you how powerful hardware is nowadays. Currently I am trying to have it play Chess with Different Armies. (The Color-bound Clobberers seem to lose pretty badly to the FIDE army, though; perhaps I should revise my piece values!)

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Comments

Fairy-Max

. Free open source chess variant software.

💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Oct 6, 2018 05:51 AM UTC:

I do know that Android compiles of Fairy-Max are available, and that people use it for instance with Aart Bik's 'Chess for Android' app. The latter only supports normal Chess, however, and none of the other variants Fairy-Max plays. WinBoard / XBoard is certainly not available for Android; it would have to be completely rewritten for that. I am not aware of any chess-variant-capable GUIs that can work with engines for Android. I don't have an Android device myself.

lweifjwielfjewfoiwjo lwiejosldfiew wrote on Fri, Oct 5, 2018 11:00 PM UTC:

Are there any known Android Apps that use Fairy-Max as their chess engine?

Steven Streetman wrote on Tue, Oct 26, 2010 07:21 PM UTC:

Thanks. I will see what I can do.

💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Oct 26, 2010 06:41 PM UTC:

Fairy-Max knows the concept of royal pieces, the capture of which means the
end of the game. You can have more of those, but in that case loss of the
first means loss of the game, so they still would not be allowed to venture
into check. From what you say, I gather your game is different. Which would
mean you cannot play it with Fairy-Max by just changing the piece
definitions in the fmax.ini file.

That of course does not mean that Fairy-Max could not be adapted to handle
the novel winning condition at the level of the C code. I have for instance
made a derivative to play Shatranj, which implements the baring rule as
winning condition, and this required just three extra code lines. To judge how
easy or difficult this would be, requires exact knowledge of the winning
condition.

Steven Streetman wrote on Tue, Oct 26, 2010 05:38 PM UTC:

H. G. Muller

Thanks for your suggestion concerning applying Fairy-Max to my chess
variant. I have just starting looking at chess variant playing software and
there are a few. Before I download it and start trying to figure it out I
have a question.

Question:
My chess variation is different in that one side (white) has one King and
the other side (black) has two Kings.  There are, consequently, very
specific rules concerning checking the black King(s) and checkmate. For
example when black has two kings in play they are immune to check but not
immune if they are simultaneously checked. So I am wondering if this
circumstance would preclude the use of Fairy-Max?

Number of ratings: 2, Average rating: Average, Number of comments: 24

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