Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Sep 21, 2018 10:50 PM UTC:
BTW, I always interpreted the promotion rule in CWdA as that you could only promote to pieces of your own army. This seemed logical to me; promoting to pieces of the opponent army strikes me as unnatural and ugly. But now I believe this is not what Betza originally meant
The rule is definitely that you may promote to a piece in either army. I know I've seen that explicitly stated, with reasoning, on one of Betza's pages here. (There are quite a few auxiliary pages about CwDA, armies, and piece values by Betza on the Chess Variant Pages, some of which might not be in obvious locations. This is something I've been meaning to look into cleaning up.)
But the Colonel has a major shortcoming: it cannot move backwards fast. All native Nutter pieces actually have that problem. So if it comes down to a promotion race, and they can only promote to their own pieces, the Nutters are toast.
Yes, this is exactly right. It would make the act of pawn promotion for the Nutters wildly inferior to every other army if the they could only promote to their own pieces.
NN > CC > FF > RR
This is certainly not how I would rank them. I would do almost the opposite. I'm not sure whether FF or NN is better and I'm not sure if CC or RR is better, but I am confident that both CC and RR are stronger than both FF and NN.
I've started studying this formally. I was going to wait until I had completed more testing to get into it, but since the subject is being discussed, I'll explain what I have so far, which is some solid testing of the FF vs. CC match-up.
I started by coming up with a number of different, but balanced, opening positions. I have 20 different opening positions with FF as white and CC as black and another 20 positions the other way around. These positions are roughly 8 moves deep into the game. I have also programmed ChessV with the ability to play a list of games one after the other in "batch mode" and record the results. I then played each of these 40 different positions 10 different times with slightly different time controls and settings and compiled the results:
CC beats FF: 178
FF beats CC: 157
draw: 65
So it certainly appears that the Clobberers are stronger than the FIDEs (which is what I expected.) It is possible, of course, that these results are not perfect. Chess programs can only "see" so deeply and then they must evaluate the position, and they do that with parameters we supply - for example, we tell the program how much the pieces are worth. There are lots and lots of parameters, and while I believe what I have provided are very reasonble, they are almost certainly not perfect. One important evaluation parameter for this match-up that we don't know - what should the color-bound bonus/penalties be? In Chess, having both Bishops is worth half a Pawn. But the Clobberers have two color-bound piece types. What if you lose both of the pieces on one square color but still have both on the other? This should trigger a large penalty, since the opponent can avoid both of those peices by occupying the other color, but how large a penalty? More testing is needed to continue to refine the accuracy of the evaluation parameters ...
The bottom line is that this result should not be considered 100% conclusive, but the difference is large enough that it is almost certain that the CCs are at least somewhat stronger than the FFs. I will post all my test positions and results sometime soon, but until I release a new version of ChessV with the batch mode people won't really be able to reproduce.
Now, next question. If we accept this result, and we believe the armies should be closely balanced, what to do? Obviously the FIDEs shouldn't be messed with, so the Clobberers would need to be weakened. My thought is to weaken the Cleric (BD) by making the Dabbabah move a "lame" leap - only allow leaping to the second square if the first square is empty (BnD). I plan to test that change and see what the results are like.
the Nutters seemed to have not much trouble beating FIDE
Interesting, this is not what I would expect. I think this is the next match-up I'll start testing. The challenging part of the testing is computing a number of different but balanced opening positions ... Stay tuned.
The rule is definitely that you may promote to a piece in either army. I know I've seen that explicitly stated, with reasoning, on one of Betza's pages here. (There are quite a few auxiliary pages about CwDA, armies, and piece values by Betza on the Chess Variant Pages, some of which might not be in obvious locations. This is something I've been meaning to look into cleaning up.)
Yes, this is exactly right. It would make the act of pawn promotion for the Nutters wildly inferior to every other army if the they could only promote to their own pieces.
This is certainly not how I would rank them. I would do almost the opposite. I'm not sure whether FF or NN is better and I'm not sure if CC or RR is better, but I am confident that both CC and RR are stronger than both FF and NN.
I've started studying this formally. I was going to wait until I had completed more testing to get into it, but since the subject is being discussed, I'll explain what I have so far, which is some solid testing of the FF vs. CC match-up.
I started by coming up with a number of different, but balanced, opening positions. I have 20 different opening positions with FF as white and CC as black and another 20 positions the other way around. These positions are roughly 8 moves deep into the game. I have also programmed ChessV with the ability to play a list of games one after the other in "batch mode" and record the results. I then played each of these 40 different positions 10 different times with slightly different time controls and settings and compiled the results:
CC beats FF: 178
FF beats CC: 157
draw: 65
So it certainly appears that the Clobberers are stronger than the FIDEs (which is what I expected.) It is possible, of course, that these results are not perfect. Chess programs can only "see" so deeply and then they must evaluate the position, and they do that with parameters we supply - for example, we tell the program how much the pieces are worth. There are lots and lots of parameters, and while I believe what I have provided are very reasonble, they are almost certainly not perfect. One important evaluation parameter for this match-up that we don't know - what should the color-bound bonus/penalties be? In Chess, having both Bishops is worth half a Pawn. But the Clobberers have two color-bound piece types. What if you lose both of the pieces on one square color but still have both on the other? This should trigger a large penalty, since the opponent can avoid both of those peices by occupying the other color, but how large a penalty? More testing is needed to continue to refine the accuracy of the evaluation parameters ...
The bottom line is that this result should not be considered 100% conclusive, but the difference is large enough that it is almost certain that the CCs are at least somewhat stronger than the FFs. I will post all my test positions and results sometime soon, but until I release a new version of ChessV with the batch mode people won't really be able to reproduce.
Now, next question. If we accept this result, and we believe the armies should be closely balanced, what to do? Obviously the FIDEs shouldn't be messed with, so the Clobberers would need to be weakened. My thought is to weaken the Cleric (BD) by making the Dabbabah move a "lame" leap - only allow leaping to the second square if the first square is empty (BnD). I plan to test that change and see what the results are like.
Interesting, this is not what I would expect. I think this is the next match-up I'll start testing. The challenging part of the testing is computing a number of different but balanced opening positions ... Stay tuned.