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Kevin Pacey wrote on Sun, Mar 10, 2019 09:54 AM UTC:

For what it's worth, here's a link to a CVP page showing games invented by one of the (possibly few) female members of CVP. Granted, the games may not reflect what the vast majority of female chess variant players might wish for in CVs that they would often play:

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php?type=Any&orderby=Type&displayauthor=1&displayinventor=1&inventorid=CBagleyJones&usethisheading=Items+Invented+by+Christine++Bagley-Jones


JT K wrote on Fri, Mar 8, 2019 06:39 PM UTC:

I will add that I like the 8 stone chess idea.  Maybe the 8 stones (or however many you use) can be the job of the teammates.  One person gets the pieces, the other gets the stones.


JT K wrote on Fri, Mar 8, 2019 06:19 PM UTC:

I think it's cool that you want to make it more female-friendly, but I'm not sure that the name change and having teammates sit across from each other is necessarily enough (or apparent enough to cater to female players).  Nevertheless I do still like those two ideas.  It's a nice combo of "lady" and "bughouse."

I'm not too concerned about specific time controls as much as move order rules.  I'm not sure what other bughouse variants there are, but my understanding of the present form is that two games are running on their own time, and each player just suddenly receives the captured pieces from their partner's game, available to drop.  Without a specific move order it's a lot of wild and crazy luck and/or waiting strategies (unless I'm missing something about the normal bughouse rules).


Aurelian Florea wrote on Fri, Mar 8, 2019 05:27 PM UTC:

First I'm not sure why my original title for the subject has not held.

Anyway Jeffrey thanks a lot for discussing it.

Yes, I mean a new game indeed with more formal time controls (which we can establish), but the crux of the matter was to design a game with that in mind along with other features which should define nextchess. The disadvantages of "classic" bughouse is exactly what has got me into this. But the concept of a 2vs2 seems intriguing to me. It is just poorly executed here.

Ladybug is the name of a  supposed to be a variant, or more likelly a class of variants, as I think new bughouse should be (it's just my taste though), but more female friendly (hence the "lady" part)

. I think ladybug is a small insect.

Because it is a difficult task I decided it's better to make it a team effort. Ex-president Kenedy was not there for no reason either.

Short story I strongly believe that the computer almost AI era needs a reformation in what we call chess.

 


JT K wrote on Fri, Mar 8, 2019 04:38 PM UTC:

Aurelian, I always thought that bughouse was usually considered a "wild and crazy" mostly blitz-timed game - the sort of thing people don't analyze but just enjoy watching in action.  Are you trying to develop a more formal turn-based version of bughouse? Personally I was never a huge fan of it because of the uncertainty of talking rules, the timing of the exchanges, etc. but will enthusiastically discuss these things if you're trying to create a more standardized version of bughouse that people could actually go back and analyze.

What do you mean by ladybug?  Is that a current variant or you're just talking about what it could be called?  


Aurelian Florea wrote on Wed, Sep 26, 2018 05:01 AM UTC:

I have found it thanks :)! For both of you, Carlos and Fergus!


Carlos Cetina wrote on Tue, Sep 25, 2018 04:55 PM UTC:

@Aurelian

Click here: https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=36867


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sun, Sep 25, 2016 01:37 AM UTC:

Ok!


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sat, Sep 24, 2016 04:12 PM UTC:

Let's not forget the context I was speaking in. I was speaking of what it would take for a game to replace Chess as the #1 Chess variant in the world. As long as that is someone's design goal, I am going to apply strict standards in evaluating its chances of meeting that goal. By no means does this mean that other Chess variants are not worth playing or that Chess is my personal favorite Chess variant. If I held those opinions, I would not be running this site.


Kevin Pacey wrote on Sat, Sep 24, 2016 11:40 AM UTC:

Hi Aurelian

My opinion would be just one man's, and I'm relatively new to chess variants myself. Fergus may be right in that familiar pieces may give a game a head start as far as being more accepted, say in becoming heavily played on Chess Variant Pages' Game Courier (possibly with some time needed for a game to become more and more popular). That's if you take the trouble to make a Game Courier preset for your game. It might encourage you that I'd guess Shogi (Japanese Chess) may have seemed a little strange to people right after it was first invented, as far as having certain pieces with asymmetrical, complex movements goes (e.g. the Gold & Silver Generals). The road of a pioneer or inventor is not always a smooth or sure one. I've felt in my gut that chess variants I've invented may excite people, only to change my mind later in a lot of cases (though I'm prone to changing my mind a lot, anyway). As far as my tastes go, I like games with fairly simple rules, boards and piece movements, but there are a lot of people who play what I think are strange or uninteresting chess variants, at least on Game Courier.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 24, 2016 06:28 AM UTC:

Kevin,

I personally would be interested in finding out if there is room for variants like apothecary chess which use weird pieces like the griffin, aanca or zebra (which is weird enough on a 10x10 board). I think there is.

Chess has some arbitrary aspects to it like en passant and castling, but they complete the game.

One of the cristicisms brought by Fergus to my variants was that they don't use "classic" fairy pieces like the marshall and archbishop, and the regular knight (by indicating gross chess as an better alternative to my apothecary). My point here was  to enhance chess by adding new pieces and expanding the board. If I failed please state that, I could stop!


Kevin Pacey wrote on Fri, Sep 23, 2016 09:39 PM UTC:

Fergus wrote on None

...Chess has been finely honed by natural selection to be free of arbitrariness. Every rule and piece in Chess serves a purpose, and none are arbitrary. Since Chess is what won the survival of the fittest among Chess variants, I expect that any variant capable of succeeding Chess would also have to be free of arbitrariness. But most Chess variants differ from Chess through some arbitrary change to it, and they easily get lost in a sea of variants that each differ from Chess in their own arbitrary ways...

In a way I like seeing this opinion, as a chess player (who also has fully recovered from some loss of faith in chess due to computers). However, I'm fairly sure you didn't mean to say that chess has so far been clearly superior in terms of merit to all chess variants. That would be a little disconcerting, even to me (after my venturing into the world of variants), since I concluded that among the dozens of variants I looked at (however briefly), many even in my eyes had compensating merits for anything they might lack compared to chess - some are quite different to chess and are hard to fairly compare. What e.g. Circular Chess lacks in terms of basic mates compared to chess, it makes up for in certain other ways (though initially these ways did not impress me so much), and Circular Chess may well not even be one of the better variants objectively (if objectivity is possible comparing variants).

I'd also wonder a little about whether chess doesn't have any arbitrary aspects to it, too (some might say any game or sport must have some arbitrary rules/kludges). For example, stalemate being a draw could be ruled as a win (or 3/4 of a point) for one side, instead (but that would spoil many fine stalemating combinations/swindles, besides altering current endgame theory). One thing 8x8 chess has going for it is that bishops are very close to knights in value (even for those who quibble), so variants on other board sizes and/or shapes may lack this nice feature. However, in Glinski's Hexagonal Chess, for example, where apparently a knight is worth a pawn more than a bishop, interesting trades of knight for bishop and pawn can frequently occur (I think), rather than bishop for knight as in chess, making the nice equivalence of a B for N in chess something that's not so meaningfully special.

I think what has made chess so popular is that given its rules & 8x8 terrian, it works remarkably well (e.g. in producing many brilliant games between people), and no one seems to know exactly why. Still, remember that Shogi & Chinese Chess are considered "Classic" variants, too.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sun, Sep 18, 2016 07:35 AM UTC:

I'd like to conclude this discussion with the hope that grandmaster level chess will eventually evolve to include variants like Grand Chess and Omega Chess or why not for the really weird ones my 2 apothecary variants I proposed during this discussion.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 03:52 PM UTC:

H.G.

I think fairy max has some clock problems, it runs out of time on ocasions. Is that normal?


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 11:36 AM UTC:

I use as time control 2 mins for 30 moves as my computer is rather weak but it has 2 procs indeed.

How can I setup experiments over night or while I do other stuff? I have to copy paste the initial position everytime anyway and the game does not just restart, Also if I could restart it how do I get hold of the results?


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 11:31 AM UTC:

The difference between aanca and griffin is  much smaller than I expected indeed!


H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 11:28 AM UTC:

Indeed, you would have to know how much deletion of a Pawn would change the result. E.g. if the Griffins beat the Aancas by 60% with equal Pawns, but only score 45% with an additional Pawn handicap, you know the Pawn was worth 15%, so that the original superiority of the Griffins was 2/3 of a Pawn (i.e. 33cP per Griffin).

Note that the random error of the average result in N games is 50%/sqrt(N). So in 100 games the error would be 5%. If a Pawn indeed corresponds to 15%, that would mean the random error in the value determination is 33cP. By playing 2 vs 2 that error is divided by 2 in a singlepiecevalue, i.e. you would measure the value to an accuracy of 1/6 of a Pawn. To make the error twice as small you already need 400 games. This is why I suggested to use time controls as fast as possible, If you can do 12 games per hour you can do 100 games overnight. (And if you have a multi-core CPU, you could play several games in paralel.)

In any case it seems that the Griffin - Aanca value difference is not spectacularly large,


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 10:49 AM UTC:

On second thinking I should find out how much a pawn translates into a win, in both apothecary games!


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 10:40 AM UTC:

So the total number of wins for griffins is slightly higher but not convincingly. Now I believe that the difference between them is less that a pawn. I think I have to continue the experiments as things don't seem to go any particular way, yet. If the 41% wins for aancas hold then the distance between aanca and griffin is probably small then a pawn. I'm not sure though. Then I'll do something else maybe take a pawn from the griffins or give a pawn to the aancas.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 10:34 AM UTC:

Here are the result of some preliminary experiments I've done:

bishops in aancas white:1.5
bishops in griffins black:4.5
1 draws (draws enter in the points above)

knights in aancas white:4
knights in griffins black:2
0 draws (draws enter in the points above)

bishops in griffins white:5
bishops in aanca black:1
0 draws (draws enter in the points above)

knights in griffins white:2.5
knights in aancas black:3.5
1 draws (draws enter in the points above)

total:
games 24 from which draws:2
aancas poins:10
griffins points:14

[edit:]

Here I pited an army with 2 aancas against an army with 2 griffins.

the promotion rule was rook at 8 rank.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 06:10 AM UTC:

Now I'm starting the serious experiments. I'll use values normalized to a pawn of 60 as H.G. suggested, and the rook lowered acordingly.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 06:08 AM UTC:

I have completed my general view on the 2 twin games:

There were six games of apothecary 1 and six games of apothecary 2.

Scores:

Apothecary 1: white 3-3 black no draws

Apothecary 2: white 2-4 black no draws

Length:

Apothecary 1: 50-80 moves

Apothecary 2: 70-90 moves

Piece values used by Fairy-max:

Apothecary 1

pawn:85
knight:272
bishop:286
wizard:258
champion:272
rook:510
aanca:612
griffin:748
queen:816

Apothecary 2

pawn:85
knight:231
bishop:286
elephant:251
camel:218
zebra:204
rook:510
archbishop:680
marshal:748
queen:816

The high rook was an accident It was supposed to be 493, but I won't redo this.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sat, Sep 17, 2016 04:06 AM UTC:

I must say I'm pleasantly surprised by the way Fairy-max handles openings. Being said that I used a generous time counter 15mins+15secs, I've seen pawn sacs and fianchetto bishops..

A weird thing is not until now there were no draws in 4 games of each incarnation. Fairy-max usually avoids repetition draws, which is also cool.


H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Sep 16, 2016 08:38 PM UTC:

KPK would definitely be a case where you must promote to at least a Rook, and can afford to do it. If you would use Fairy-Max for piece-value testing, it would probably be better to keep Rook as the promotion choice in the entire zone. I don't expect the details of the rules to affect piece values much.

In fact Fairy-Max can be configured to use different promotion piece for white and black. This was needed for asymmetric variants like Spartan Chess. It is a bit tricky, though: white always promotes to piece #7, but if black does not have a piece #7 in its initial setup (as Fairy-Max thinks it should be, so the one given in the 3rd and 4th line of the game definition), but white has one, but black has a piece #9, it uses the latter as promotion piece for black. So you could make piece #7 and piece #8 both Bishops, and have white use #7 and black #8 for the Bishops in the initial setup. Then you can define Rook as #9. Black Pawns would then promote to Rook, and white Pawns to Bishop. You can then play many games to see how much white is handicapped by this. My guess is that it would be almost nothing.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Fri, Sep 16, 2016 05:42 PM UTC:

KPvsK still a win, I forgot about it, and is very important. It seems my rule devalues promotion rather than giving extra options as it was intended. It could work if you fine tune a variant just for it. It is not the case here. I think postponing for a rook could still work in many cases, I just don't see postponing for a queen happening to soon.


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