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I have no idea what you mean

Agreed, but I'm not sure if it is a different stalemate.

Ok, diagram updated with Chancellor.

What was White's last move? The version you have doesn't have the updated rules yet, so the black joker can't move. In the updated version, the black joker will have the ability of white's last move, which could make it a checkmate if it attacks the white king. Otherwise, it is still a stalemate under the new rules. Any piece white moves would lead to white's king being in check by the black joker. Even white moving joker (imitating a king) would make black's joker imitate a king and therefore it is still check. Since white cannot move, it's a stalemate.

The short story is that black has just captured an chancellor on h10 and white is to move. The version that I have (I think is the last one published) gives now a stalemate. The long story is that any piece moved by white leads to a king capture by black in the next move. Here actually the black chancellor on e2 has a role to play. The difference from the studies we already have is that a role is played by the white joker who inherits and transmits a king (more actually a man I think) power. Is that in the second case a checkmate or a stalemate? It looks like ChessV as white has sacrificed it's chancellor for an easy draw, but is this a way for black to checkmate the opponent? And most important how should it be? I am confused by this myself. Depending on what you can do Greg, I am ready to adjust the rules in these rare cases. The most important thing is though, that the rules are clear for everybody.

And c is a chancellor, but this actually has no importance!

This should be close enough for discussion:

The fen of the position, as is found in chessV, is this:

3J3k1w/10/10/8p1/2P5Pp/1S7P/5s4/10/4c4j/7BK1 w - - 0 78

but I did not manage to do it. Here J stands for joker, w stands for wizard, s stands for maasai pawn. The rest are self explanatory.

Indeed, it automatically invokes the Diagram Designer, with default settings. For a static image that should be good enough. You can also use the Interactive Diagram as a game viewer, by including a parameter moveList= , followed by all the moves of the game. This preloads the game in the Diagram, and you can then use the buttons in the AI panel to navigate through it.

Oklh, that is using the diagram designer, isn't it?

You just write a FEN of the position between [ fen] and [ /fen] tags, somewhere in the text of your comment.

I think I have encountered a new situation involving the joker. I want to post a png with the position but I don't know how. Can someone tell me how to add a picure in the comments?

Ah, I see. That is 79%, which is way outside any statistical error bar.

So for 106 games it would be around 4%, so that the 62/106 (=58.5%) score is about two standard deviations above equality

What I meant was that white won 62 games more than black. The actual numbers were 80 white wins, 18 black wins, and 8 draws. This was very different from the first test, where black won more, but with a much smaller margin.

This is an anomalous result; if the games were really independent, the statistical error should decrease as 1/sqrt(numberOfGames). So for 106 games it would be around 4%, so that the 62/106 (=58.5%) score is about two standard deviations above equality, while the other score pointed to equality with a 3% standard error. The standard error in the differens of the two results should be about 5%, so the 58% is off a bit more than you would expect, but not extremely so.

What I often did to make the games more independent is play them as shuffle games. If you shuffle white and black independently (as seems natural for CwDA) you can create a lot of starting positions even when you leave King and corner pieces in place.

How many is a lot? I did one set of 200 games and had a final score of -2, but then I tried a second set and by the time it got to 106 games the score was 62.

What would be good settings for evaluating the balance of a different armies variant? I've tried some tests with 0:30+10 and Medium variation but got conflicting results.

Your results are understandable.  Although the armies are not balanced, they are close, so you need to play a *LOT* of games to get valid results that are not swallowed up by noise.  At a time control of 30+1, you can't play many games.  And such long controls aren't necessary since with games on an 8x8 board ChessV can reach a search depth of 10 in a fraction of a second on a modern computer.  But the other thing to watch out for is that you aren't playing the same game over and over.  The search variation setting helps, but I also use different pre-calculated opening lines.  I will post more about this soon ...

What would be good settings for evaluating the balance of a different armies variant? I've tried some tests with 0:30+10 and Medium variation but got conflicting results.

Thanks!

May you specify if the new version is ready? I am on the tip of my toes for that!

I'm sorry, I know you're anxious.  I will post as soon as it is ready, but I can't say when exactly that will be.

May you specify if the new version is ready? I am on the tip of my toes for that!

Hello Greg,

Have you an idea about when you will release the next ChessV version?

@Greg, If you allow customizable low material evaluation like KMK (M is the CW), may you make it with lists like in KWWK(W is the CF)? I'm sure you though about that, too, and it is a bit late to raise this problem, but it could turn helpfull!

But it should become easier to find cut moves when the evaluation is constant. If all leaves would be evaluated as 0, the first random sequence of moves will be the PV, and every move you randomly pick in a cut node would immediately be a cut move.

What is the problem with a high branching factor? You can search less deep in a given time, of course, but that also holds for any opponent.

I was surprised by just how shocking slow it became.

With alpha-beta the EBF only grows as the square root of the typical number of moves. So even if the latter is 6 times higher, the EBF would only go up by a factor 2.5.

The square root growth is a theoretical value, and while it may be commonly achieved, it is certainly not guaranteed.  What I suspect is happening is this.  The board is very large, the armies start far apart, and no additional evaluation parameters have been added.  So I suspect that there are just a lot of moves where the evaluation is the same so we get way less beta cut-offs.