💡📝Sam Trenholme wrote on Mon, Sep 21, 2009 12:43 AM UTC:
Yeah, I'm really excited about the new version of ChessV. WinBoard will make the 2010 tournament much easier. If I'm going to have a lot of WinBoard-based games, I am going to need to extend WinBoard to support free castling in WinBoard. Schoolbook actually allows the king to move two, three, or sometimes four squares when castling.
I understand that it can be hard to get a chess engine to vary its move. Perhaps it would be possible to add more randomness to the beginning of the game, which decreases as the game progresses. Or perhaps just have another program that automatically generates a fairly reasonable opening book...
That said, Zillions does have a parameter that allows one to adjust how random moves are; I'm not sure how Jeff Mallett and Mark Lefler implemented it.
My plan ('plan' being the operative word) is to modify Winboard to implement free castling, having it so, if playing Schoolbook, one of the engines doesn't recognize the free castling move, Winboard will simply rearrange the pieces for that engine and continue the game. This will give engines that know how to do free castling an edge.
I hope to do all of this 2010 sometime. Right now, my geek time is pretty much filled with finishing up the next release of a DNS server I have written.
In terms of coming up with an opening book for a given variant, assuming a given setup has five reasonable opening moves for white, and each one of those moves has three replies for black (15 so far), and white has three replies for each of those replies (45), and each subsequent reply has three reasonable responses, we have 1215 leaves after 6 plies, or three moves. This is enough to check for things like white having an edge and what not, assuming all chess engines we use are completely deterministic.
I understand that it can be hard to get a chess engine to vary its move. Perhaps it would be possible to add more randomness to the beginning of the game, which decreases as the game progresses. Or perhaps just have another program that automatically generates a fairly reasonable opening book...
That said, Zillions does have a parameter that allows one to adjust how random moves are; I'm not sure how Jeff Mallett and Mark Lefler implemented it.
My plan ('plan' being the operative word) is to modify Winboard to implement free castling, having it so, if playing Schoolbook, one of the engines doesn't recognize the free castling move, Winboard will simply rearrange the pieces for that engine and continue the game. This will give engines that know how to do free castling an edge.
I hope to do all of this 2010 sometime. Right now, my geek time is pretty much filled with finishing up the next release of a DNS server I have written.
In terms of coming up with an opening book for a given variant, assuming a given setup has five reasonable opening moves for white, and each one of those moves has three replies for black (15 so far), and white has three replies for each of those replies (45), and each subsequent reply has three reasonable responses, we have 1215 leaves after 6 plies, or three moves. This is enough to check for things like white having an edge and what not, assuming all chess engines we use are completely deterministic.