Single Comment

It is surely a shame that ZoG development seems to be completely, totally
over.  When asked on their discussion boards if a new version is ever
forthcoming, no answer is given.  However, doing some of what Derek
suggests is redicuously difficult; it's not just a problem of limitations
in the Zillions description language that require you to have hidden pieces
and such; that view totally misses the point.  Ugliness and performance
problems are just the tip of the iceberg when addressing issues such as
Synchronous Chess.  The Alpha-Beta NegaScout algorithm that is fundamental
to most every commercial Chess program in the world cannot be used! 
Period!  If someone wants to address the Synchronous problem, and write a
program that *actually* plays this game, then they have to start from
scratch, and they do so without the benefit of any technical articles
written about the problem anywhere!  (I've read every word ever written
about writing programs for chess variants.  And, since such literature is
almost non-existant, it didn't take me long :)

That being said, although ZoG can't really be expected to play some of
the more radical games well, like Synchronous, there are some things that
its creators could do that would immediately make it infinitely better at
a large number of games, and those improvements would not require any old
ZSGs to be rewritten, and would be quite easy to implement.  They could,
for example, allow a new flag for piece types that allows the ZRF
programmer to specify the base value of a piece (excluding square
bonuses.)  The problem is solved quickly, because the responsibility is
transferred to the programmer, but it would not make any old ZRFs
obsolite, because they don't use that flag, so the program would use
default values.  And it is just so simple that it could not possibly take
more than an hour to implement.  But, it has been known that ZoG doesn't
evaluate pieces correctly for years, and there are lots of posts about it
on their discussion boards.  It seems that they are not even going to do
simple, quick improvements.  It's really too bad.