Ratings & Comments

Kevin!...

About game courier just ask me and I'l' do it. It is fine for me!...

I'll also teach you how!...

Yes that type of elelphant it is the lieutenenat of spartan chess. Or "the captain" I'm not sure. I like it because it is closer in value to the knight. Also the non square nature of the board helps. An alternative for another game (as you used in wide chess which we have played once) is the waffle. I think a lieutenant game and a waffle game would be more interesting than the 12x8 one! That is my opinion.

Thanks, Greg (and for the reply)!

I'm running analysis on the current Hanibal array now, then I'll try my alternate array.  This will take several days.  It requires a lot of CPU power, and at the moment the process is fairly manual.

I'm not sure how well it would work for really large boards or lots of pieces.  My guess is that the larger the number of legal moves, the more games it would take to differentiate between positions.  I don't really know yet just how many games are needed to drive down the margin of error sufficeintly.

If we do find a better array, I personally wouldn't change the name.  37 games of Opulent have been played and I'm changing the array.  I'll make a note in the game description about what the original setup was and why I changed it but that's about it.  I don't consider a change of array to be a new game.

That's now fixed. The function was testing whether a rankname equalled a filename, which would always return false. It was supposed to compare the ranknames of two coordinates.

In my game here, I want to capture En Passant.  It does not show as a legal move, although if I tell it to make the move anyway, it does work.

Some thoughts ...

The selection of pieces in this game make sense - adding another minor piece that is about the value of a knight but colorbound.  The game didn't seem to play all that well in my experience but I can't really say why.  I do think the opening array makes a huge difference and it is very difficult to evaluate the quality of one.  Chess works so well because the array is perfect - TONS of different openings that are playable.  Thousands, in fact, at least until recently when hundreds and hundreds of years of study has established many as inferior.  I had a thought about the array for this game that I meant to mention to you but don't think I ever did.  How about putting the elephants in the corners?  Then the center eight files are still the same as Chess, greatly increasing the chance that array is good.  The edge pawns would still be protected by the knights (although one does tend to develop them first, which would leave the pawn unprotected, but then again, the most common first move in Chess is p4 which immediately creates an unprotected pawn.)

Another posibility instead of or in addition to the previous thought - upgrade the modern elephants to war elephants (FADs).  Now your new pieces are about the same power as rooks, but colorbound.  If games are more likely to be popular with more popular pieces it might help.  Plus, on a larger board, it may be more appropriate to add rook-level pieces than knight-level pieces.

Finally, I'd say that popularity on GC is not necessarily a great metric of a game's quality.  If a game is very popular on GC, especially in games that don't involve its creator, that certainly is meaningful.  But the inverse, a game is not popular, doesn't necessarily mean much - especially if its creator is not actively promoting it.  There just aren't that many different players here and there are a ton of games.  The numbers are too small to be statistically significant.  Opulent Chess has had decent popularity including many games I wasn't involved with.  I also think it's a good game and its popularity is deserved.  BUT ... it has been around for 15 years, as have I.  If I disappeared shortly after submitting it, as so many of our active users of old have, would it still be popular?  Doubtful.  And what about Unicorn Great Chess?  David Paulowich did disappear almost completely fairly soon after its release, and it has been fairly popular, but I have been here actively promoting it, and David's games in general.  Otherwise?  Don't know.  Certainly we wouldn't have an ongoing GC tournament including both these games if I wasn't here :)  So don't get discouraged - at least not by one data point that doesn't have much statistical significance.

As an aside, for a long time I've been trying to use ChessV to determine how good an opening array is.  This informed the array for Opulent.  But my technique has greatly improved since then and now I am 100% certain that the Opulent array is inferior.  (I'll be officially changing it soon.)  I'll briefly describe the new approach here since the newest ChessV pre-release that I posted will give others the ability to do this too.

Basically, the technique is as simple as running lots of ChessV against ChessV games (only the beginnings needed) with the Variation of Play set to Small.  Save and analyze them and see how much actual variety you get.  The more variety, the better the array.

Without going into too much detail, the implementation of Small Variation of Play ...  The evaluation of a position is based on lots and lots of parameters.  One of the important ones is Piece-Square-Tables (PSTs.)  The is a bonus or penalty for each type of piece occupying each square (player specific.)  You can see the PSTs in ChessV by right-clicking on a piece and selecting Properties.  The Midgame and Endgame tabs will show the PSTs.  (Endgames might have different values than Midgame, obviously - the King should move out and become active in the endgame and pawn advancement becomes more important.)  These PSTs are calculated at the start of a game for each type of piece in the game based on the weighting of various parameters: is it in the small center?  is it in the large center?  how many small center squares does it attack from here (assuming empty board)?  how many large center squares?  how far forward has it moved?  The variation of play makes tiny random adjustments to the weightings of these parameters for the different piece types.  It also makes tiny random adjustments to the weightings to a bunch of other evaluation parameters related to development and other things.  The overall effect, however, isn't totally random.  I'm not just adding a random value to every position as many chess programs do.  And I'm not at all sure that the default weightings of all these parameters is optimal.  The tiny changes, at least when it is set to Small, is about as like to make the engine stronger as it is to make it weaker.

Now that some time has passed, I cannot say I consider this variant totally a hit with Game Courier (GC) players. In the vast majority of games this variant has been tried so far, I, the inventor, have been one of the players, normally (always?) the one issuing the invitation on GC to play it, so I'm pretty well having to promote my own variant in order for it to be played by anyone, as far as I know.

Some months ago I gave some thought as to what ingredients might make for (relatively) popular CVs, at least on GC. One was that, unless there were exceptional reasons, powerful pieces were by far more popular with players than weaker ones (even minor pieces, such as the, usually popular, ferfil [{modern} elephant] in Hannibal Chess), especially if an inventor was to add a small number of pieces to the armies of existing CVs (notably such as the armies of orthodox chess) in order to produce a new CV. Just today I (re-)checked the list of 1200+ presets of GC and the number of times each has been played, so as to confirm that earlier conclusion.

While a limited number of pieces and pawns (normally) can be added to a 10x8 game, some 12x8 games with pieces and pawns added to the orthodox chess armies exist already - but very few have been played more than a handful of times on GC, regardless of the strength of the pieces added in to the FIDE army - so maybe CVs with that board size are just plain unpopular to play on GC (except for the decidedly un-FIDE-like Courier Chess, which is a historic [and thus IMO automatically popular] CV).

Perhaps very stubbornly, I soon ignored/forgot my conclusion about powerful pieces (maybe largely because I didn't want to invent too many CVs with a lot of power endowed in each army, lest too many such CVs prove poorish/unplayable in the long run), and I came up with a number of ideas for CVs that were in the spirit of Hannibal Chess and other CVs I've made, where pieces of minor/(weak major) strength were added to the FIDE armies (usually), on boards of varying dimensions.

So, I now suddenly realize, in some horror, that most/all of these (many) new CV ideas of mine are very likely doomed to prove unpopular, if submitted. To go ahead & submit anyway? Would that be like spamming CVP with useless CVs, if accepted? Maybe I'm stubborn enough, to at least preserve what might be examples of CV art, if it's not stuff that IMO has got a better chance to be played lots. For my study (and for some minimal preservation for posterity) I at least already have Diagram Designer diagrams for these CV ideas squirreled away on CVP as [edits to] comments of mine, with my now old reasons for why I rejected each CV in question (looking back, I now think they might all be quite playable, if not big hits aesthetically/popularly).

This game was also invented in 1970 by C. G. Lewin under the name Knights Chess.  It appears in Chapter 14 of the CECV, and Ed Friedlander made a java applet here (though we don't seem to have a Game page for it).

It checks if a Pawn is on the destination space and if only one move has been made on the present turn. If these conditions are met, it tries to complete the move by asking what to promote the Pawn to.

Hello Fergus,

In the preset for Gross chess this line of code appears:

elseif and not fnmatch "*;*" thismove == P space #to:

It appears in the pawn promotion subroutine. Could you explain in a few words what it does, as I can't get my head arround it?

Thanks!