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Could there ever be a meaningful world chess variants championship? This may just be a silly question, in that the answer might seem to be that, since obviously there are limitless CVs possible (and CVs are being invented all the time), there could be no meaningful CVs world championship possible (the opposite being true in the case of a given single CV).
Nevertheless, Mind Sports championships are regularly held now, although one might argue that since the choice of 'mind sports' played by the contestants is to some extent rather arbitrary, the winner of such a championship has a somewhat nebulous honour at best.
If we in the CV community ever in future wish to confine a similar sort of championship to a carefully selected set of CVs, to be the basis of a CVs world championship tournament or match(es), how might such a selection of CVs ever give the winner of such a CV world championship a clearer sort of honour, relatively close to as is the case for a chess world championship winner, for example?
Our website chessvariants.com offers its own lists of what are (currently!?) considered the 'best' CVs, although such lists would at some point, to satisfy such a careful selection process, need to be narrowed down to a smaller, single list of (currently) 'best' CVs, perhaps based primarily (if not exclusively) on the currently most popular CVs played. If this could be done by a world CV authority organization at some point (or perhaps simply by eliminating all but CVs [if ever significantly more than one] from a future Mind Sports list of games etc. for their championships), a world CVs championship might to some extent be meaningful. Note that as newer CVs eventually become popular enough, they could be taken into account in the selection process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_sport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_championships_in_mind_sports
Futashikana Shogi. Expanded version of Shosu Shogi played on an 11x11 board.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝A. M. DeWitt wrote on Fri, Jan 18, 2019 01:47 AM UTC:Note to editors: The site name for this page is incorrect. It should be https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/futashikana-shogi instead of https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dacimal-chess. As this page hasn't been approved yet, the change can be made without any trouble.
I'm not sure if the comunity is large enough to warrant such a competition. Nor the audience. Maybe we should stick to organizing tournaments here :)!
Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Jan 18, 2019 04:18 PM UTC:Which reminds me, I'm putting together an outline for Game Courier Tournament 2019 now. Stay tuned!
Game Courier Tournament 2019. Chess Variant Tournament to be played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝Greg Strong wrote on Sat, Jan 19, 2019 12:09 AM UTC:Next Game Courier tournament announced. Let me know what you think.
Please let other members know who might be interested but may not be actively watching the site if you are in communication with them.
@ Aurelian:
Remember, this thread is all about ideas for the future of Cvs, maybe even the far future, perhaps. :)
Even with that said, there's already a list of my own I could suggest of 10 fairly well-known and relatively popular CVs, which might form the basis of even a not-too-distant-future CVs world championship, perhaps (note if ever an arrangement with Mind Sports competitions could be made, there'd be less need for an overall world CVs body, maybe). The list starts with the 3 Classics from the chessvariants.com Recognized Variants page (although these 3 are in the Mind Sports Olympiad already, albeit via the way it is currently organized):
1. Chess;
2. Shogi (Japanese Chess);
3. Xiangqi (Chinese Chess);
4. (4 player) Bughouse;
5. Crazyhouse;
6. Fischer Random (aka Chess960);
7. Grand Chess;
8. Glinski's Hexagonal Chess;
9. Circular Chess;
10. Seirawan Chess.
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Jan 19, 2019 12:32 PM UTC:Makruk is conspicuously absent from that list.
But in a chess-variants contest I would avoid variants for which a large body of opening theory exists. Participants are likely to come from one of these backgrounds, and would then be hugely advantaged when they play those games against players from another background. Next to Xiangqi, Chess and Shogi, Makruk and Jiangi probably should be disqualified on that count too.
It does seem good to have variants in there that are reminiscent of all these major chess variants, though, so that (say) Shogi players cannot complain that all the games are too 'chess-like', etc. Chess960 would be OK, but if you already have that, orthodox Chess just seems 'more of the same'. Unfortunately there don't seem to be similar variants of Xiangqi and Shogi; in fact Xiangqi variants are hardly existent.
We could of course make up some slightly modified versions of these games, which would not have any popularity by themselves, but act as substitutes for the over-popular variants. E.g. Shogi with an extra Copper General in front of the King, promoting to an (8-fold) Knight, or Xiangqi where Elephants are allowed to cross the River. (To name a few "10-sec variants".)
We should consider a formula 1 like competition using computers, and maybe desing games with that in mind. This is what apothecary series is about but I cannot obviosly claim that I know better :)!
Game Courier Tournament 2019. Chess Variant Tournament to be played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝Greg Strong wrote on Sat, Jan 19, 2019 02:42 PM UTC:Anything. I am trying to measure how much interest there is.
Hello Greg.
Please sign me in at the event. Certainly Symmetric Chess is the variant that I would propose as my favorite.
Thanks for the organization!
I'd play but I was thinking about choosing just a few games and have 3-4 separate tournaments of some of those games. Not that my way is better :(!
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Sat, Jan 19, 2019 08:09 PM UTC:I would love to be a part of this event. My favorite variants that are currently on the list are (in no particular order) Sac Chess, Colossus, Opulent Chess, Gross Chess, and Hectochess. Also, on a side note, I tend to not favor games that are not much like chess, escpecially if their rules are complicated like they are in Decima or if their presets don't contain full rule enforcement.
💡📝Greg Strong wrote on Sat, Jan 19, 2019 10:34 PM UTC:Participants confirmed so far:
Greg Strong
Adam DeWitt
Carlos Cetina
Aurelian Florea
@ H.G.:
Regarding CVs with a large body of opening theory, it would seem it's tough to avoid that if the relative popularity of a CV is to be an important criteria for inclusion in a CVs world championship event. Mind Sports abstract games competitions include the big 3 classic CVs (chess, shogi and chinese chess), and the organizers must have considered the edge some players might have over others in playing 1 or more of these 3 CVs (although the number is very small, being just 3 games, which may allow participants some time to bone up on opening theory of up to all 3 of these CVs, if necessary).
Regarding Makruk, I had the impression it was a largely regional CV, in a way moreso than shogi (or any of the other CVs on my suggested list of 10 CVs), but I am far from sure. On a personal note, when I glanced at Makruk's wiki, I found the rules a bit elaborate to follow, with regard to the draw result conditions (though chess has some, albeit rarely arising, special drawing case rules, too). I would hope a CV would be played by, say, at least 0.5 million people to be deemed indisputably popular enough even for Mind Sports, which I saw included Renju, which is a more interesting form of Go Moku. That may currently rule out something as interesting as Circular Chess, but I recall Glinski's Hexagonal Chess at least at one time had something like 0.5 million playing. The first two links below include popularity figures for the games in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makruk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess#Gliński's_hexagonal_chess
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renju
[edit: The Oriental Variants link on chessvariants.com, under "Games" in the main menu, seems to have quite a fair number of variants that are at least remotely like Chinese Chess, especially if something like Storm the Ivory Tower is counted, though I suspect few have any truly significant degree of popularity:]
@ Aurelian: At the moment chess has seperate world events for computer vs. computer contests, and maybe still once in a while there are Man+Machine vs. Man+Machine contests. The last I heard of Man vs Machine, the machine side was giving odds in matches to make things more interesting - including the machine having less time to think. As far as any relatively new CV, even, having a similar contest, I think it won't take too long before a reasonably well programmed/self-teaching machine would need to give odds to the best human, too.
@ Everyone: A fresh idea of mine that also may seem rather unrealistic (at the moment, anyway) is for chessvariants.com, arguably the main CV website on the internet, to simply run an annual world CVs championship tournament of its own and then declare the winner to be world CVs champion for that year. Obstacles could include: 1) how to distinguish ourselves from any other website or offline organization later claiming to do the same; 2) how to try to take any anti-cheating measures, if the honour of the title is to be taken very seriously (one measure might be to play just newer or obscure CVs in such an event, to try to more easily avoid the chance of any undetected CV engine assistance, in spite of what I wrote above in my reply to H.G. re: popularity of CVs selected may matter); 3) at some point, how to provide a prize ($, or a trophy, or CV product[s] of some sort, or simply a news story in any media that will take notice) - any entry fee for this type of event may help; 4) how to have enough people playing on Game Courier, compared to some of the other possibly more active CVs (or chess+CVs) servers or play-by-mail sites out there. All in all, this may be a tall order, though so may be trying to get the attention of the already established and well organized Mind Sorts organization, if that were ever to be tried.
I agree with your points Kevin.
But human online competitions are virtually impossible to be held online and still be engine free.
For the online media cyborg chess is the best option.
And human tournaments are expensive.
Anyway here is a list of my preferred games: Grand Chess, Omega Chess, Shako, Eurasian Chess, Gross Chess, 8 stones chess, CWDA. Say we organize these in the same location. Worldwide there are always high travel costs. But besides that. If you organize the tournaments more or less separately in order to avoid fixture clashes as much as possible, you will have a huge schedule on your hands. Very unfeasible most likely. Fergus once proposed to hold each round with a different game. I don't think that is that fair either as some games are more drawish than others, for example. Moreover if we are talking about a swiss system then the games that are first are less important. And you won't get enough world championships to make enough permutations to make it at lest long term fair.
As of now (20th of January 2019) I don't see clear solutions to these problems.
Guys?
@Fergus
Hello
This preset: https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Apothecary+Chess+1&settings=Apothecary1working
still has errors as we had discussed before (an infinite cycle).
This one is virtually the same but lack the erros of the first one.
https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Apothecary+Chess+2&settings=Apothecary2working
They seem to similar to me and still apothecary 1 has errors. Could you please check? Maybe it is a problem with the system. Could you help? Thanks!...
@Greg
Would you agree the inclusion of the upgraded apothecary 1&2 into this years tournament provided that I can do (with Fergus's help) the rules enforcement and move displays in time?
Game Courier Tournament 2019. Chess Variant Tournament to be played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]An important thing would be to have only enforcing displaying presets.
Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Jan 20, 2019 04:34 PM UTC:Apothecary 1 is already on the list. When we know who is playing, we will vote on which games from the list are included. Each inventor can only list one game though.
Game Courier Tournament 2019. Chess Variant Tournament to be played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Jan 20, 2019 04:38 PM UTC:We don't know which games will be included yet. I do not want to exclude games that do not have a rule-enforcing preset at this time. If games are picked that do not have them yet, I will see if one can be made.
By doing automated comparisons with the Compare plugin for Notepad++, I determined that the code in these two presets are the same. Although you say that they display legal moves, they do not. They presently lack any post-game code, but that is where code for recording the legal moves should go. What errors in particular have you been seeing?
When I tried to move a Pawn in the second preset, I got the error "Call to P subroutine got misrouted."
Looking at your code as it is displayed below the error message, I do not see a P subroutine defined anywhere. So, it appears to be calling a subroutine that is not defined in your code. Looking at the code you have written in your pre-game section, you have
commented out. This is the include file that would have the P subroutine defined in it. So, including it should eliminate this error.
include chess3
Returning to the code displayed below the error message, this code is properly indented, and anywhere the indentation seems incorrect, you may find an error. On line 85, you have an endif without a semicolon after it. You have the same error on line 114.
When I try to use the first preset, it repeats "Please report any bugs or errors to Fergus Duniho" on the screen endlessly. In looking more closely at the code, I see that they are not the same. I guess I was not using the Compare plugin properly. I've tried it again, and this time it is showing differences. But I have not determined what is causing this infinite loop.
In the one with the infinite loop, there are complicated piece functions for the G and A pieces, and the N function has some more code in it. One of these functions might be at fault. I would recommend that you get the second one working, then introduce these functions back into the script one at a time and see what happens. I do not think that anything in the post-move code is involved in the infinite loop, since it happens before I have the opportunity to make a move. But to rule that out, you could try deleting the post-move code temporarily to see if it makes a difference.
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This looks like omega chess besides it's 10x10 board :)!