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Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Nov 14, 2019 01:33 AM UTC:

I somewhat like the notion that a player can't make a first move that puts himself into stalemate if there is an alternate sequence.  Unfortunately, this would be extremely difficult for me to implement.  Like Zillions, ChessV handes multi-move variants by treating each leg as a separate move and implements the double move by adjusting when the side-to-move is flipped.  To implement this, I would not know if a move is legal without generating moves another level deep, and that would be a radical modification.  In practice, I think this would almost never come up in a real game.  I had a hard time even coming up with a position where I could test this.

So far as I know, there is no other xboard engine that plays Marseillais (or another GUI that enforces the rules.)  I really hope that changes.  To that end, I'm not inclined adopt an interpretation that makes it substantially harder to make a fully compliant engine to address a situation that is extremely rare at best.

Don't get me wrong - when trying to nail down the rules for classic games, ability to program them shouldn't be the top concern, and certainly shouldn't constitute a veto of clearly defined rules.  But the classic rules are in doubt, very likely were played with different interpretations at different times (to the extent these corner-cases were even considered), and the rules have been evolving.


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