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Feeble Chess to Weakest Chess. Some Chess variants with weaker pieces. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
David Howe wrote on Thu, Apr 11, 2002 01:02 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★I wish I had thought of this! The idea of finding the weakest possible pieces that still provide a chess-like game is inspired. For some reason, it reminded me of my attempt to create a <a href='../newideas.dir/construction.html'>chess variant construction set</a>. The concept of a flipping move to switch between capture-only and move-only is something I never thought of. On the whole, a well-thought-out, and aesthetically pleasing game. I must try it out sometime!
If we created higher dimensional analogues of the Feeble/Weak/Weakest pieces, would we be able to make a playable higher-dimensional CV with them (perhaps even a Chess For Any Number of Dimensions)?
Very interesting game. I hope to try it out soon. The idea that assuming a capturing posture is in effect part of the movement of a piece is fascinating. A suggestion for a table-set: for a capturing posture, place the piece slightly over the edge of the square towards which it is oriented. For orientation of a piece, locate the piece just within the edge of the square towards which it is oriented. Regarding Ralph's aspirations to create a Chess variant that feels like Go, one that is primarily intuitive, that would be great--although I cannot claim to understand master level Chess thought. Kids play intuitively, until they get 'spoiled' by reading Chess books! Intuitive play is definitely more fun. I read that Capablanca played intuitively (I guess he could get away with it because he was so brilliant), but that was part of his downfall when he encountered players that studied a great deal. In fact, part of the appeal of Chess variants is that they keep us guessing. I have to say, though, that Zillions spoils the fun a little by making it quite easy to study new games.
I think this game will make a basis for a game that will be very difficult for computers to play. In fact, I have made a balanced four-move variant of the game that works like this:
<ul>
<li>White makes one move
<li>Black makes two moves
<li>White makes three moves
<li>Black makes four moves
<li>Both sides make four moves for the rest of the game
</ul>
This somewhat speeds up the game, while making the number of possible moves per side so large that standard alpha-deta searches that computer chess games use completely ineffective in this variant of the game.
<p>
It is the same idea as Arimaa, but not bounded by the copyright/patents that Arimaa has.
Finding the weakest possible truly chess-like pieces is Betza's raison d'etre here. A different Betzan cv is Weak!, forty years old, Weak_Chess.
''The feeble rook's estimated value is one twelfth of a Rook,''
but a comment questions the positing of one twenty fourth, 1/24, more or less by the time it has become weakened to weakest. Actually this same Feeble has several classic Betza comments on
Capablanca and the_Go/chess_interface.
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