Ratings & Comments

Alfaerie is one of the six preconfigured settings in the design wizard for the interactive diagram, (setting the right values for the image directory, square size, white/black prefix and graphics type at the press of a button), and in fact the default choice. Other buttons give you Abstract, Motif, Utrecht, 2 sizes XBoard presets. And of course you could use your own uploaded graphics, by supplying the location and other parameters to the design wizard explicitly.

For the pieces I needed Alfaerie was not too bad. I had to improvise a bit for the (Mounted) Veteran, using the Wazir(-Knight) instead, thus only indicating the non-capture move correctly. But that seemed acceptible.

Some of the other Alfaerie pieces look embarrasingly simplistic (e.g. Elephant), so I usually prefer the XBoard theme when I need any of those. Even the orthodox pieces look pretty ugly in Alfaerie; they are not anti-aliased, giving them a very ragged appearance. This is so 20th-century... I think it is high time someone would take the trouble replacing all the Alfaerie image files by anti-aliased versions (with alpha channel).

versus  

BTW, I am happy you like Veteran Chess. I have not programmed it into any engine yet, but I play-tested it against a regular participant of the Dutch Superchess championship over the board, and it seemed quite playable. That 1:1 trading is discouraged by leaving the opponent with a promoted piece seems compensated well enough by that in 2:1 trading you can promote your second piece to compensate for the loss of the first. E.g. a Pawn protected by a Pawn is pretty much unassailable in orthodox Chess, but here after BxP, PxP, NxP=M promoting the Knight to a Rook-class piece plus capture of two Pawns seems enough compensation for the Bishop. So you don't get into stand-off situations too easily.

As an opposing army for orthodox Chess this seems way too strong. A leaper with 16 targets typically is worth about 7 Pawns, and with 24 targets about 11 Pawns. Together with the Sages, which are about Knight value, this already balances the fide army. But in addition you have the two Flying Jesters, which are major pieces, and should be worth at least a Knight, and more likely about 4 Pawns each.

So pitting this against fide is like being Rook + minor ahead...

Today I've had an idea for a CV that might be called 'Accelerated Courier-Spiel'. The thought is to try to come up with a modified version of Courier-Spiel that one day just might be significantly more popular with modern day chess (and CV) players.

The rules would be the same as for Courier-Spiel, except:

1) Some form of fast-castling rules would be used - in particular such as those used for my own 'Wide Chess' CV:

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/wide-chess

2) The 'fool' pieces (move like guards) would be replaced by Archbishops, in the setup (a slight 'rationale' would be that thus for the new setup, one chess minor piece has been knighted [= the Archbishop] and the other chess minor piece has been crowned [= the Centaur]). [edit2: A slightly different setup seems advisible to make these and the other changes most feasible]

3) The pawns would behave as in standard chess, except that they can promote to any piece type in the (modified) setup, except for a king. [edit: if centaurs replaced archbishops in the setup, then the resulting CV idea might be called Centaur-Spiel]

Note I thought about somehow having Chancellors in the setup, too, but given that I wanted 12 non-pawn pieces per side still, I didn't mind excluding Chancellors as I've always worried they might trade each other off too easily in CVs where they can be developed to be able to do so in just one more move, if either player is willing or has no better option. [edit4: Below is an idea that might be called Capa-Spiel; See above for my own suggested castling, pawn rules. edit6: Perhaps it might often be hard to castle kingside completely safely, at least early on, owing to possible pressure by the enemy Q, bishop(s) and chancellor - in any case the position of the Archbishop in the setup might also cause some awkwardness (also the case in the previously diagramed setup, for Accelerated Courier-Spiel):]

[edit: Adding an Archbishop and Centaur to the FIDE army on 10x8 (like for Capablanca Chess' Archbishop and Chancellor addition) might be an interesting concept. edit3: A slightly different setup, after the changes, again seems advisible to me. edit5: The following (reverse symmetry) idea could be called Centaur Princess Chess; pawns would be like in chess, and castling rules would be like in my earlier Wide Chess. edit7: The setup may seriously limit the number of interesting opening variations, at least in the early stages of a game, I fear:]

[edit8: 22-Nov-2019: Currently I'm not liking any of these 3 CV ideas, as in their setups, very much.]

[edit9: Here's an idea of mine (with castling and pawn rules as suggested for my Accelerated Courier-Spiel idea above) that could be called Hurly-Burly Spiel; I'll study it at my leisure:]

Note that wikipedia's entry for Kirins states that 2 of opposite colours can mate a lone K without help from their own K; also, Dr. Muller's results elsewhere indicate that on 12x8, K & 2 fibnifs (also called lancers) can mate a lone K, and he opines that K & 2 horsewazir compound pieces really should be able to mate a lone K.

[edit11: I don't really like this CV too much since neither side has a full FIDE Chess army included, which is why I worked on edit10's CV idea.]

[edit10: Here's another idea of mine, somewhat similar to the last one (i.e. with same castling and pawn rules), which could be called Hurly-Burly Chess; I'll study it at my leisure:]

[edit12: I'm afraid I don't really like this CV idea too much either, since the enemy Archbishop in the setup might make castling queenside often/sometimes a somewhat unsafe idea, and the board is very wide in any case, which makes it especially impractical for over-the-board games (besides trying to recall the setup).edit13: Lately I think I'm worrying too much about possible defects for all these CV ideas.]

Nice one Ben, exactly right.  In addition:

Pushing the King to d5 also works, but my original idea- just like your line of thinking, was "return to the square it just left" like in my checkmate example in the Pieces section. Even though it can do a lot, I'm pretty sure the sentry is still just a bit weaker than a bishop (and that's how I wanted it), for example if the sentry were a pinned piece here, it can't perform the final mate move, while a bishop already has it mated. Advantages and disadvantages is what I was going for.

 

Nice idea!... Is there anyone interested for a personal challenge?

Ben, if you liked the sentry example, here's another one, a bit trickier. White to move and mate in 5:

I had similar problems in Shogi, when I tried to search check drops in addition to captures. Some lines just continue forever, and with depth-first that is of course fatal. This looks especially stupid when alternative moves to the infinite line in many places include a mate-in-1, which would have alpha-beta pruned the infinite line had they been searched first. So I tried a scheme with an iteratively deepened QS that would back up score intervals rather than one-sided score bounds (and would return {standPat, INF} for QS nodes with captures that were too deep to search), deepening it until the interval in the QS root collapsed to a single value. This way you would find the closest forcible (through QS moves) mate before searching any deeper lines. But this still wasn't enough to make the problem disappear, so I abandoned that again, and only search captures now.

The problem is that this is really very wrong in games with piece drops. Even recapture exchanges are often meaningless there, as the capture of a protected piece might give the opponent the piece in hand that he needs for an all-check-drops mate, so that you cannot afford to recapture. It seems Bonanza in every QS node first does a 3-ply checks-only search to see if it can checkmate that way, and if it cannot searches only captures (or stand-pat).

Even most engines for orthodox chess limit the search of checks to the first two ply of QS. They are furthermore selective in what checks they search, and usually prune those that can be evaded by a SEE > 0 capture on the checking piece.

It is still an open question for me how, when you have a QS that also is controlled by a depth parameter, you can best increase the tree size in an iterative deepening scheme. The simplest way would be to just keep the QS depth fixed, and iterate the depth of the full-width search as usual. I suspect this is very sub-optimal, though, as it requires the tactics that QS misses because of the depth limitation to be discovered by the full-width part. Which is not only the most expensive thing you could do in the leading plies from the position that was too complex, but adds to the tree everywhere. It leads to the complex tactics being resolved only when the branches ending in simple tactics (presumably the large majority) have already been deepened too, while the resolved score could be such that it upsets the entire tree, making most of the deepened lines irrelevant.

Increasing the depth of individual QS until they converge OTOH leads to very much (possibly infinite) effort on QS that in the end might turn out to have scores that makes the branch leading to them irrelevant. Iteratively increasing the QS depth limit in the tree as a whole before increasing the depth of the full-width search would waste a lot of time walking the same full-width tree in parts where you encounter only QS that have already converged for the current depth limit.

I have the feeling it should be possible to control the search depth with a single parameter from the root, which would both increase the QS depth limit and the full-width depth as it grows. E.g. with a QS that does an M-ply all-capture search followed by unlimited-depth recapture-only, you could keep track of whether the QS actually did prune any captures that were not recaptures. If there were, M was not large enough to converge the QS, and would have to be increased. The search could be made to converge the QS first, before being allowed to search any non-captures. E.g. by counting each QS ply as half a full-width ply, and when an N-ply search is requested, start with a QS there, increasing the QS depth limit to at most 2N. If QS converges before that, it all moves with a d=N-1 reply (or applicably further reduced), if not, it just returns the unconverged QS result (signalling to the parent that it cannot yet switch to full-width).

Please forgive me for noticing septem, not septum.

I think the easiest solution is just to make stalemate a win so king + wildebeast can win against bare king.

I don't see any need to change the promotion rules though.  Even if you don't change stalemate, promotion is not an issue.  You are only forced to promote to wildebeast if you do not have a queen, in which case you promote to a queen and can checkmate easily.  The only other case I see is the unusual position where you don't want to promote to a queen because that would stalement immediately, but since the horsemen promote on the 7th rank I don't think that is possible.