H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Dec 18, 2018 02:34 PM UTC:
I agree that the whole table hardly contains relevant information. (The reason I had the applet displaying it was mostly for debugging, to compare with the known statistics of orthodox pieces.) It would be sufficient to just print percentages won and drawn, and the average and maximum number of moves needed to force mate in a won position. It would of course be easy to suppress the more detailed info.
The applet is inherently dynamic, and only calculates information for the board size seen in the accompanying diagram where when can practice the end-game. The time needed to calculate the End-Game Table for an 8x8 board is pretty short, but it rises quickly with board size (as the cube of the number of board squares), so that doing many different board sizes (some large) at once would be a bad idea. If static information on the end-game statistics for several board sizes is the only thing that is desired for a Piececlopedia page, (accompanying a sentence that points out the piece has mating potential), it would be best to just hard-code that in the HTML. (The applet could still be used to calculate the required info before incorporating it into the page, of course.) There would be no need for a diagram in that case; the latter only serves the function of allowing interactive play.
If the applet would have its own page, it might be possible to set it up such that individual Piececlopedia pieces can link to it through some standardized link (saying something like "Practice checkmating with this piece"), in such a way that the page opens configured for the piece in question. (E.g. by passing the Betza descriptor for the move as a CGI argument in the URL.) We would have to pick a default board size, though. (8x8 seems the obvious choice.) The applet page itself could allow the user to alter the board size, within reasonable limits.
Of course not all pieces have mating potential. So deciding which pages should have a link to the applet should be done 'by hand'. This is probably necessary anyway, because the info for how the piece moves would have to be provided with the link. So all the Piececlopedia pages for pieces with mating potential would then have to be hand-edited.
I agree that the whole table hardly contains relevant information. (The reason I had the applet displaying it was mostly for debugging, to compare with the known statistics of orthodox pieces.) It would be sufficient to just print percentages won and drawn, and the average and maximum number of moves needed to force mate in a won position. It would of course be easy to suppress the more detailed info.
The applet is inherently dynamic, and only calculates information for the board size seen in the accompanying diagram where when can practice the end-game. The time needed to calculate the End-Game Table for an 8x8 board is pretty short, but it rises quickly with board size (as the cube of the number of board squares), so that doing many different board sizes (some large) at once would be a bad idea. If static information on the end-game statistics for several board sizes is the only thing that is desired for a Piececlopedia page, (accompanying a sentence that points out the piece has mating potential), it would be best to just hard-code that in the HTML. (The applet could still be used to calculate the required info before incorporating it into the page, of course.) There would be no need for a diagram in that case; the latter only serves the function of allowing interactive play.
If the applet would have its own page, it might be possible to set it up such that individual Piececlopedia pieces can link to it through some standardized link (saying something like "Practice checkmating with this piece"), in such a way that the page opens configured for the piece in question. (E.g. by passing the Betza descriptor for the move as a CGI argument in the URL.) We would have to pick a default board size, though. (8x8 seems the obvious choice.) The applet page itself could allow the user to alter the board size, within reasonable limits.
Of course not all pieces have mating potential. So deciding which pages should have a link to the applet should be done 'by hand'. This is probably necessary anyway, because the info for how the piece moves would have to be provided with the link. So all the Piececlopedia pages for pieces with mating potential would then have to be hand-edited.