Ratings & Comments
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, May 29, 2019 12:25 PM UTC:The previous version was still plagued by a woken-up 'sleeper bug': all the end-game discounting worked fine when I tested it on setup positions for the end-game, but it did not apply it when the same end-game was reached in games! Turned out castling messed up the Rook counter, which had never mattered before, as the count was not used. But now it made the drawishness code think both sides had (tons of) Rooks. I uploaded a fixed version ("KingSlayer cwda-1.2") to the same link. This also prints some results of the drawishness detection for the root as part of the Thinking Output, so that it can be easily seen when it misjudges. Like Fairy-Max it slightly randomizes the first 8 ply of any game, (adding -8 to +7 cP to the score of each move in the root), to provide more game diversity in test runs.
Chess with Different Armies. Betza's classic variant where white and black play with different sets of pieces. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]@HG,
Also there is another effect that amplifies pairing bonus or color bonding penalty. The effect of the pair being able to block the king from part of the board. That the same way rooks do on their own. Bishops do that. Two dababahriders to that, and they only cover half the board among themselves anyway. Wizards or fads do not.
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, May 31, 2019 09:07 PM UTC:Well, it is difficult to asses whether this capability for a pair to statically create an impenetrable barrier for a King is really important. Actually I think that Wizards can just do it (on 8x8), when standing next to each other in the center. But very often pieces can inflict a 'dynamic confinement' on a King. As long as you have to spend fewer moves to maintain it than the King needs to escape, you have moves to spare for other pieces to approach. Besides, FAD complement each other in a different way: standing next to each other the completely cover a 5x6 area, As a result they can drive a King to the edge with checks, and checkmate it there, without any help. This makes them very, very dangerous.
Even a King + Bishop can dynamically confine a King on boards of any size. The King has to cover the hole through which the opponent threatens to escape, and has to follow the bare King as long as it keeps running in the same direction to renew the escape threat. But when it reverses direction, to try an escape on the other side (which he eventually must, as he bumps into the edge) you have one free move. Therefore a Bishop can checkmate together with an arbitrarily weak piece (as long as that can go everywhere) on boards of any size.
Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Jun 2, 2019 08:01 PM UTC:Nice! I didn't have an opportunity to mess with this during the week, but I now have KingSlayer cwda integrated within ChessV cleanly. It is pretty strong!
I am finding one issue, though. Sometimes upon promotion KingSlayer sends the wrong notation. For example, ChessV was playing the Clobberers with the white pieces and KS was playing the FIDEs with the black pieces. When it went to promote, it sent c2c1q' which is not correct. The Queen is part of its army, not the opponents, so the quote shouldn't be there. (ChessV then says it forfeited due to illegal move.)
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Jun 2, 2019 09:36 PM UTC:A yes, this was something I couldn't test, because WinBoard doesn't accept dressed letters as promotion suffix yet. This was a bit of a subtle bug: the quote suffix was initialized to 0 when entering the MoveToText routine, and then set to a quote if promotion to the 7th piece type occurred before being printed. But by an oversight the suffix had been declared as a static char, so the initialization did not work on every call of MoveToText, but only at program start. So once a move with quote suffix was printed, all promotions would from then on be printed with this suffix. (But WinBoard happily ignored that.)
I uploaded a fixed version to the same link.
Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Jun 2, 2019 11:25 PM UTC:Sorry, H.G., it looks like that did not solve the problem. I am also getting an occasional crash. I'll email you the debug output. But when it doesn't crash or make illegal moves, it seems to win the majority of the time :)
Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Jun 2, 2019 11:39 PM UTC:Also, it looks like it doesn't support both sides playing the same army?
H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Jun 3, 2019 06:19 AM UTC:Are you sure you got the new version, and that there was no problem with your browser caching the old version? It should say cwda-1.3 for the version number, and have 'dragons' as one of the options for the White/Black Army (not properly working yet, though). I tested it with a position "8/6P1/6k1/8/8/8/8/1K6 w - - 0 1" in FIDE vs Rookies, and it does play g7g8q without quote in that position.
In earlier versions I had some crashes too, which seemed to occur when the score got extreme. This disappeared after I calculated the interpolation between opening and end-game evaluation in a less overflow-prone way, and the version I originally posted had played several hundred games against Fairy-Max without a single crash. It could be that I broke something when changing the check test to also work with ski-slides. (But I see in the log that this happened for 1.2, so this cannot be the explanation.) This crash also doesn't reproduce.
Indeed I did not put equal armies in the list it announces in the variants feature. It would recognize the names in the 'variant' command, but of course a proper GUI would never send those if the engine did not announce it supported those. It is possible to play equal armies by selecting those through the White/Black Army options, and then select variant fairy. (This is how I test, as it currently is the only method where it is compatible with Fairy-Max, when I tick the option for old piece names, and turn traitor promotion off.)
BTW, in the log I see that you did not send a 'memory' command to set the hash size. That means KingSlayer would use its default hash size, which is only 1MB.
Chess with Different Armies. Betza's classic variant where white and black play with different sets of pieces. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]While watching a cpu vs cpu game of eurasian I had noticed that vaos do not seem to care either about color binding as in the early game color binding is compensated by the other pieces and in the late game lack of platforms probably damages them more.
Greg Strong wrote on Tue, Jun 4, 2019 11:52 PM UTC:Yes, you're right, I was still on 1.2 somehow. I will test with 1.3.
What is wrong with Shou Dou Qi?. Comments on the rules of Shou Dou Qi - the Animal Game.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]As I read the rules (and ths is how we have played it) a piece is captured by another pece of at least the same strength enteriing th square of the frst mentioned piece. I have not found any rule that expliciity forbids enteriing the same square as a stronger piece; the stronger piece is simply not captured (nor does it "capture" the weaker entering piece since the rule requires that the capturng piece must be the one entering the square). The only problem we have encountered with this interpretation arises if playinng wth 3D figures instead of flat disks, since it is diffiicult to "stack" 3D fgures.
Tenjiku Shogi. Fire Demons burn surrounding enemies, Generals capture jumping many pieces. (16x16, Cells: 256) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]📝H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Jun 6, 2019 09:06 AM UTC:I made an attempt to implement Tenjiku Shogi in Jocly. I even spent some time on the evaluation function. As a result it actually seems to play a reasonable game at 30 sec/move, despite its low search depth. (Jocly's generic JavaScript AI is not very fast.) The web applet can be found at:
http://hgm.nubati.net/jocly/jocly-master/examples/browser/control.html?game=tenjiku-chess
In 2D mode most pictures are not shown properly, but I'm not sure you've got there!...
Same in chu shogi!...
Hope I don't trouble you too much HG!...
📝H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Jun 8, 2019 06:42 AM UTC:Ah yes, I only payed attention to the 3d display. Yet the 2d display is always important, as the images for that are also used in 3d for the promotion popup, which asks you whether you want to promoe or defer.
When I have more time I will make a file with images of all Shogi pieces.
To me the trouble is that the 2d display is more feasable. The 3d one consumes a lot of resources.
Also I don't reconnize all the required kanji!
📝H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Jun 8, 2019 05:34 PM UTC:Yeah, the Jocly 3d graphics run quite slow when you don't have a GPU (as is apparently the case on the virtual machine where I run Linux). I was a bit in a hurry to at least get the AI working, because I had entered it in the yearly Modern Tenjiku correspondence championship, and its clock was already running, and had ticked away 96 of the available 120 days. So I didn't pay any attention to non-essential details, as I normally would.
BTW, 2d would not solve the kanji problem...
In the link you had posed, 2d was not kanji. And even if it were, I'd at least be able to memorise pieces easier.
I see your point about priorities HG. I was not picking on you. Good job. I was only pointing it out!
Chess. The rules of chess. (8x8, Cells: 64) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]For what it's worth, here's the (very detailed) wikipedia entry on Computer chess:
Tandem Chess. 4 player variant where pieces taken from your opponent are given to your partner. (2x(8x8), Cells: 128) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Bughouse tournaments seem to be happening all the time now, at least in North America (especially at scholastic level) - anyone who might want to organize chess variant(s) events over-the-board could start with having bughouse games/events; here's a link that shows what happened when I Googled 2019 Bughouse tournaments USA:
@Aurelian
Please note that the pair of personal invitations you gave me recently
Modern+Chess&log=-Vernon+Parton-2019-159-445
Symmetric+Chess&log=-Vernon+Parton-2019-159-446
were wrongly addressed to a Game Courier user that does not exist: carlos cetina (with lowercase initial letters).
I am registered as Carlos Cetina (with uppercase initial letters) and userID: sissa.
Such logs are not listed in my "Your Games on Game Courier" page.
Now then, regardless of this random fact, I'm sorry to tell you that I'm currently focused on promoting the Symmetric Chess only; and, for reasons of time and energy savings both physical and mental, I have decided not to play other variants except those included in the current tournament.
So my dear friend, send me all the invitations you want as long as they be of Symmetric Chess!!!
8-Piece Chess. (Queen's Army chess, all 8 Back Rank Pieces different).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Rules have been updated to include revised abilities on the sentry piece. It will add a more unique feel to the game than the original sentry (which was too ineffective in closed positions- even moreso than a bishop).
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Also the case of bede and WAD on different shades who work a bit akwardly but do work together fine. Probably stronger than a charging rook+fibnif or waffle+short rook. Many pawns would help a lot the CC pair. But ChessV for example know such tricks. I did whached some games.