Ratings & Comments

I thought a bit about Greg's proposal of weakening the charging rook (and his earlier proposal of weakening the Bede). I personally see big flaws with such a approach as the state space of the problem has at least 4 dimensions (16 if you consider playing white or black different things).  There could be a solution but first remember the the state space of the possible solutions is linked to the choosing of the pieces out of a small possible set, is it is probably non-neglijable likely to plainly not be able to succeed as the demands ar pretty tight. My proposal for getting out of the impasse is to combine the CWDA with musketeer chess. But instead of offering many options we may give a set of gating pieces for each of the 16 encounters (let's include FFvsFF here as they could receive slightly different pieces in order to compensate for playing white.). They can be just one piece of a general value of approximately 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or maybe pairs of the same or different pieces. Pairs of approximately 2.5 pieces seems quite interesting to me, as 2 of them worth exactly a rook and for one of them you may capture a regular minor and give up some positional or capture 2 pawns and earn some minor positional bonus.

For example in the FFvsFF encounter which in regular Betza is banned I think white should be able to gate two ffbbNsD and black should be able to gate two ffNsDbbLbH. Maybe the second piece is actaully worse but at first glance more jumping retreats should be better, be them longer. They also add to versatility especially in the endgame. Such pieces should worth around 6.5/8 knights=0.8125 knights=0.8125*3.25 pawns=2.640625 pawns=2.65 pawns, so pretty good.

Another reason Betza's implied (and indeed not stated) principle of armies with different styles should be preserved. The gating piece would probably be counter style, though in order to compensate for the misshapen of that particular matchup.

I really love the work he's done making this list, but I have to ask: Why is the Cannon rated higher than the Leon? If I understand the Leon right then it's strictly better.

Also, from what I've heard, the Cannon belongs way lower down than just beneath Rook. Maybe Zillions has some glitch when it comes to screening pieces, or maybe it's all in the starting location implemented.

Greg,to be honest,i'm not sure if we should plunge ourselves into piece change judgemets. It is, most likelly, more complex than just this experiment. Also the game needs to be fun. My take from cwda is not about balance but aboutsomething i'd call "dinamic balance" as each army seems to "mean" something. I'm preparing a small experiment on this, also!... And maybe a more interesting rook could be along the lines of fsR4bWbB2

> Are you using Inkscape, loading the bitmap, and tracing over it?

Indeed, that is exactly what I do. I do the tracing by hand in course steps with 'Pen', making a polygon with corners at every sharp corner of the perimiter (ignoring tusks, horns or antennae), and at about every 30 degrees of smooth curves. I make that 75pt wide and red (to distinguish it from the background bitmap). Then I switch to point-editing, and start to bend all the chords of curved outlines in shape, usually by adjusting the 'angular hands' that appear in the end points of the segment once you curve it. I don't use any filling at that point, to make it easy to later remove the bitmap. Then I trace over any details the same way, sometimes with a 60-wide line (and set the end-points to 'rounded'). Usually this is just one or two lines, and an eye. Then I delete the bitmap. Finally I select everything, change the 'stroke color' to black, and select filling with #f9f9f9ff (RGBA) for the outline (and possible horns / tusks, which I drew as an open 'V'). This is the color used for white-piece filling in the original Chess Alpha SVG set, and which the CGI renderer is programmed to replace. (It is annoying that this is different from XBoard's #ffffcc.) Then I group everything, 'Save as', delete and copy-paste in the next bitmap, and scale it up (through Object -> Transform -> Scale) by a factor 4096% to make the 'nominal' size equal to that of the original Chess Alpha pieces.

Of course many similar pieces, such as the riders and ferzed or wazired leapers are cloned from each other, and where I could I started with an original Chess Alpha piece, cutting away the parts I did not want by deleting the points there in point-edit mode, and then adding new points by double-clicking the segments, and move those where I want them now.

Of course it helps that I only need outline pieces, so I don't have to make black pieces separately.

It is a bit of a pain that the color-to-replace depends on the image set. I would hate to hard-code that in the renderer. We could adopt a convention that in any directory with SVG images we put a colors.ini file which the renderer would read at startup, to define the color to replace, and the default filling colors and square shades for that piece set.

Some more:

I don't think it makes sense to also make inverted or rotated images (even though that would of course not be very hard); it seems better to equip the renderer with an option to do that. That could also hold for most cut-and-past combination pieces, which can be produced from their primitives by the renderer.

I also had a look at the Alfaerie extension sets, but there seems to be a lot of nonsense there. Colored disks for use as board markers are useful, but they do not belong in a piece set. Board markers should be a class of their own, as they are usually independent of the chess font used. Also there seem to be alternative representations of the same piece. It is true that the Alfaerie Camel (and to a lesser degree the Elephant) sucks. But that's Alfaerie. One should not combine glyphs from all kind of different fonts for the same piece, and than slam a new name on the entire collection. And some of the animals in the extension set are completely 'out of style' (e.g. Crab), using a higher resolution with thinner lines. There are also multi-colored images, (with red eyes and such), which as far as I am concerned is also a no-no.

Perhaps we should clean up the set a bit, throwing out all the stuff that is not likely to be used by anyone in the future. I doubt it is useful to have all kind of 'starred' animal images, with an undefined move.

I have some more results to report.

I've generated 20 balanced opening positions with the FIDEs vs. the Nutters and another 20 with the colors reversed and run the 400-game test.  Here are the results of Nutters against the FIDEs:

Nutty Knights: 272
Fabulous FIDEs: 79
draw: 49

Holy crap!!!  That is not at all what I expected.  I don't really understand why the Nutters are so dominant, given that their total piece values seem to be about the same.  Our piece values could certainly be wrong, of course.  But I don't think they are that far off - at least in terms of what a piece is worth in general.  In which case, it shows that the true value of a piece really, really matters what else is on the board.  I'm guessing they can develop very quickly and very flexibly and get early advantage.

How to fix is a hard question.  I've thought about this some and considered a few ideas.  The one that "feels" best to me is limiting the range of the Charging Rooks to 4.  Essentially, this means that instead of the Charging Rooks being regular Rooks that move backwards as a King, they become Short Rooks that move backwards as a King.  I will test this, but I'm certainly open to other thoughts.

Speaking of fixes, I've re-run the FIDEs vs. Clobberers test with the suggested fix - change BD to BnD.  Here are the results:

Colorbound Clobberers:  180
Fabulous FIDEs:  156
draw:  64

Much better, and probably sufficient for now.  Given that we don't know what a lot of evaluation terms should be, the accuracy of these results is limited and this result is probably within the "margin of error" (acknowledging that I am not using that term in the same way that statisticians do.)  With this change, I would consider this matchup balanced for all practical purposes.

H.G., I saw your question about what the results would be in pawn odds games.  I don't know but I'll work on running that test also.

Well that is very impressive.  You've got way more done that I have so you must have a pretty good technique.  Are you using Inkscape, loading the bitmap, and tracing over it?

I'll do some more pieces in the Abstract set and upload what I've completed.  (The Abstract set is easier to do anyway since it is so geometric.)

Then I need to get ChessV supporting vector graphics, which is why I started making them.

I'm not sure if this works now. I thought I just successfully saved a (experimental/test) settings file called "3D Chess War", but it's not showing up as a settings file of mine.

Some SVG images for Alfaerie:

And some more:

And again some more:

And I leave it for now at these:

> Just testing to make sure nothing is broken after updating scripts for entering comments.

Well, be sure something is broken: the script for entering comments again complains that you are not logged in by the time when you submit a long comment, after which the entire entered text is gone when you return to the entry form. This is the worst conceivable defect it could have.

And another remark: it is indeed good strategy to make the home-page HTML. But if you wanted, you could still put some script-generated info on it, (such as the what's new) by displaying it in a HTML frame that links to the script. If PHP then is not working, the frame would just remain empty.

I'm not sure what's happening in the following game of mine. The game is listed as lost on time for my opponent, yet his clock is still ticking at this point:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Hannibal+Chess&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-161-141

I had an idea for a system to indicate pieces in FEN strings with 'dressed letters', which should not be too difficult to remember. No matter how ingenious a system is, in the end there are just too many pieces in the Alfaerie set to avoid that you have to identify some of those by the root name of their image file. The system used in Fairy-FEN, which writes this name between parentheses, using capitalization of the first leter to indicate the color, seems the obvious way to do this. This system is already completely universal. So the system of 1-letter (possibly plus one punctuation character) codes serves only to allow a more efficient encoding.

My idea was to use punctuation to indicate various enhancements of the piece indicated by the letter. Of course we wantthe orthodox Chess pieces to be indicated by their normal 1-letter ID: P, N, B, R, Q or K. But e.g. a tilde '~' suffix could be used to indicate the piece indicated by the preceding letter is knighted (the tilde looks somewhat like the letter N, hence it seems the obvious choice for indicating this). So Archbishop, Chancellor and Amazon would be B~, R~ and Q~. By also assigning single-letter codes for Wazir (W), Ferz (F), Alfil (E, as we usually depict this as  an Elephant, and for this purpose it seems more important to represent how the symbol looks than representing its move), and Dababba (D), we then also cover all 'augmented Knights', W~, F~, E~ and D~.

In a similar spirit, we could use a (single) quote for a wazired piece, and a back-quote for a ferzed piece (because the backquote typically is more slanted in most fonts). The Crowned Rook and Bishop then become R` and B'. Modern Elephant would be E` (ferfil), Phoenix (WA) would be E', Kirin (FD) would be D` and Woody Rook D'. If we assign the letter A to the Alibaba, we have A' for the Omega Champion, A` for the CwDA Fad, and A~ for the Squirrel (NAD).

A '^' could be used to indicate a rider, e.g. N^ is Nightrider, D^ is Dababba-rider. P^ could be the Shogi Lance, which is the slider version of the (Shogi) Pawn. The basic obliques would also have their own letters, N (Knight), Z (Zebra) and C (Camel). That makes the Omega Wizard C`. This relatively simple set of conventions already covers a very large fraction of the pieces one typically encounters in variants. A colon could be used to indicate Pao-like hopping: 'R:' for the Xiangqi Cannon, 'B:' for the Vao, etc. Perhaps the G and S should be reserved for Gold and Silver general.

Remaining letters could be used as abbriviations for animal names. E.g. L = Lion, T = Tiger, H = Hawk, U = Unicorn.

It deleted my comment, complaining I was not logged in...

You're probably right, in hindsight. Still, I'm still thinking over my hypothetical alternative rules. Could make for an interesting variant, if the idea is sound; I'd say in that case it's sort of a 3d variant after all, vaguely like Greg's 'Backlash', yet somehow simpler(!). It's also like that in that apparently the same player always gets White, or Black, on every board.

OK, it seems I messed up when copy-pasting the JavaScript code for the Interactive Diagram in the comment below (as it was not possible to update it in /membergraphics, and links to the updated version on my website were mutilated), and somehow destoyed the closing </script> tag, so that the entire sequel of the page has disappeared. Including the link that would have allowed me to edit it to undo this mess. When I had it as preview everything was perfectly fine, so I don't understand how this could have happened.

Sorry about this. I guess an editor will have to directly access the database to restore the </script> tag.

[Edit] I was able to recover after all. Just lost my posting. What happened was that the JavaScript was too long, and the submission software clipped my comment, including the </script> tag.So that the entire remainder of the Comments page became invisible, as the browser thought it was all JavaScript. I could access it by looking from the page source what the 'Edit' link does, and then guessing the comment ID untill I guessed right. Unfortunately I lost the entire comment because of this, as it was in the clipped section.

I wonder what the rules might have been for that variant. :) There seems to be few 8x8x4 variants in CVP database.

Here's the wiki for 3D Chess; perhaps some of the variants linked to or mentioned aren't listed on CVP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess