Comments by FergusDuniho

Since a Shogi variant might introduce complexities into the game that could make the AI play more poorly, I tried a game of Chess against Ludii. I easily won that game too. It threw away material and rarely captured my pieces.

Most of the games supported by Jocly don't have individual pages, which is what is being counted here.

I rewrote the Who page to better describe what powers the editorial staff have, and I moved Joe Joyce to a section for Emeritus Editors.

This page is mostly ready. It could use some links to the pages that the preset has a link to. I just played a game online. For my last move, I rolled a 1, a 2, and two 4s. First, I moved the Pawn to the last rank to promote it to a Rook, then I moved it to capture a Rook, and again to capture the last King. It never got any of my Kings, maybe because I was moving them to safety when I could.

May I have your permission to edit the text to include a link to your article on making the hexagonal board?

Yes, you can do that.

How precisely do dice rolls determine what you can move? If you don't move every piece indicated by the dice, can you move more than one piece of another type you rolled? If so, could you even make multiple moves with the same piece? If not, could you make multiple moves with the same piece if more than one die had the same number?

This page is now at MSshuka.

Out of their remaining twenty pieces, each player selects and places 16 pieces as they wish in the four spaces orthogonally adjacent to their Marshal, their Cardinal and the Queen (in both directions).

Do you mean multiple pieces on the same space? Or do you mean one piece on each the four closest spaces on each of the ranks and files occupied by the Marshal, Cardinal, and Queen?

Joe,

I don't know the age of every editor, but among those I do, you are the oldest. Hans and I were both born in the 60s, and David was born in the 50s, but you were born in the 40s just a bit before my youngest aunt and uncle. So, thank you for sticking with being an editor here for so long.

Many editors here have not been programmers, because editing is a different task than programming, and non-programmers can also do it. The main advantage that programming can bring to editing is that people with experience programming Chess variants will be more sensitive to gaps, inconsistencies, or ambiguities in the rules of games, as programmers need to understand a game fully in order to program it. But it also comes with the drawback that they may rather spend their time programming than editing. There is a reason why I have chosen the title of Webmaster rather than Editor-in-Chief, as Hans and David had used before me. So, it's good to have editors who are not as focused on programming as some of us are and are willing to take the time to read and edit new submissions.

I don't know that children's game

Maybe it has another name in Dutch. It is an unstructured physical contest in which boys, usually, individually vie against the other boys for control of the top of a hill through unarmed combat. It's well-known enough in English that there was an adult cartoon named after it.

This is similar to something I've done before. I used to print piece images to sticker paper and apply them to poker chips. It would be helpful if you would include some photographs of the finished product and the stages you went through. I've also made a hexagonal board. See Make Your Own 91-Space Hexagonal Board. You can see photos of it in some pages for games that use it.

Based on the information provided on this page, the inventor is misidentified in ChessV.

Since Greg hasn't responded to my earlier question, I went ahead with adding a ChessV tag to games playable on ChessV.

Here are the games on ChessV I did not find a page for here:

• Duplex Chess by Greg Strong
• Gilded Grand Shatranj by Joe Joyce (This is briefly mentioned on the Grand Shatranj page, but the description is too brief, and the Game Courier preset it links to has no landing page, does not describe the rules, and is not programmed to enforce the rules.)
• New Zealand Chess by Unknown
• Nightrider Chess by V. R. Parton (maybe it's in one of his documents, but it doesn't have its own page.)
• Odyssey by Greg Strong
• Opti Chess by Derek Nalls
• Relative Royalty Chess by various
• Unicorn Grand Chess by David Paulowich and Greg Strong
• Warochess by Eric Warolus
• Wild Castle by Unknown

With this complete, I have edited the header to use the ChessV tag to tell whether a game is supported in ChessV, and I have removed the Chessv column from the Item table.

The new preset is allowing Chameleons to capture pawns with diagonal moves.

Okay, that's now fixed.

In How Ai Ai Got its Name, I learned that the significance I thought it could have was completely wrong. It would be a good name for a romance anime about robots, because Ai could mean A.I., as in Artificial Intelligence, or could be a Japanese word for love. But, no, that's not what the name means.

I changed the links to Ai Ai to our link page for it, and I changed tens to dozens, as we don't normally speak of tens of something in English, but we will speak of dozens, and the numbers are close enough together that dozens is likely to be true.

However, dozenal is a neologism in this context. On looking up the word, it describes numbers in base 12, which is not what is meant. I would suggest replacing it.

The new Ultima presets are ready. Since the ones Antoine Fourrière had written were broken, and he is no longer active, I wrote entirely new ones that made use of the fairychess include file. These will display legal moves, and they will display piece names and descriptions in error messages. To test the new code, I replaced his preset with a new one and ran all the old Ultima games with it. Where a game complained about an illegal move, I checked which preset was at fault, and I made corrections in the new one when it was at fault. It turns out that the old preset allowed some illegal moves. In particular, I recall it allowing the King to move into check from a Coordinator. I also noticed that it handled suicide moves as deletions of spaces, which would be appropriate for Chesire Cat Chess or Wormhole Chess. For backwards compatibility, I enabled the substitute Galactic preset to handle deletions as suicide moves. But for the main fairychess preset, which the links on this page now go to, I did not. It will handle suicide moves as incomplete moves that do not include the destination. This is one of the standard ways that Game Courier handles suicide moves, and it works better with the mouse than the other ways do. One last thing is that I changed the notation to use co/CO for the Coordinator and ch/CH for the Chameleon. This should be less confusing than using c/C for the Coordinator and x/X for the Chameleon, especially if you are using the Abstract set, which displays the Chameleon in the form of the letter C. But this is only in the new fairychess preset. To be compatible with old games, the Galactic preset still uses the old notation.

The difficulty I have with that is making the notation work with it, since if I record the extra move, it isn't considered legal in some situations.

To avoid the need to write code for screening out extended moves, Game Courier uses the maxmove system variable and the ban and allow commands. The maxmove variable indicates how many moves may be made on a single turn. You can use the ban command to ban many things globally then use the allow command to make exceptions for certain types of moves at certain places in the extended move.

Okay, I fixed the problem with suicide moves. I was thinking there were only two ways of writing them, but there were three, and by conflating two of these together, I had failed to update one of them to save values for $old and $moved when a suicide move is made. Given the multiple ways for writing these moves, I had decided to test for a suicide move by checking whether the moving piece and the last captured piece were the same, but for the full notation way of writing a suicide move, I hadn't done that.

(But in shuffle games you would also have to remember the start position, or at least the random seed used for generating it.)

It normally stores the seed, but when several games of Fischer Random Chess broke because PHP's algorithm for selecting random numbers had changed, I added constants to the language. Since Game Courier is designed for correspondence games, it runs a game from the beginning for each new move. Unlike variables, whose values are determined only by the running of the program and the input fed to it, constant values were stored in logs or $_POST data so that they would be available without re-running the code that originally generated them. The main thing distinguishing a constant is that it's value survives from one run of the program to the next. With that in mind, its value may be changed if necessary, but this is done with a special command, since going along with the way constants work in other languages, a constant is supposed to keep the same value.