Ratings & Comments

I've found a bug with this preset.  In this position:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Colossus&log=mageofmaple-ChessShogi-2019-61-909&userid=mageofmaple

I cannot take the bishop with my pawn becuase it says I would be moving into check.  I assume it is because of the way I castled (the King only moving a single space.)  I believe the position of the king didn't get updated, so it thinks his queen will be attacking my king if I make the capture.

When I looked over the time controls before, I didn't notice the thing about the 4 moves per week pace. I had previously modified the invitation script to not include the option of setting a pace in the time controls, but I forgot about doing the same thing in the script for defining a round. The code is kept in Game Courier for backwards compatibility with games that still use it, but I do not recommend its use. Here is how it works. I have added some extra comments to better explain things.

// As long as you keep the desired pace, your reserve time is kept from falling below $sparetime.
// $i is the turn being checked. $i & 1 returns 0 or 1 to identify the player.
if ($timeleft[$i & 1] < $sparetime) {
    // Total time that has passed from beginning of game
    $timepassed = ($timestamps[$i] - $timestamps[0]);
    // If average duration for a move is less than the set duration for a move,
    // then moves are being made faster than required,
    // and $timeleft is raised to value of $sparetime.
    // Equivalent to -> if ((($timepassed / 2) / $i) < ($paceperiod / $pacefreq)) 
    // but loses no precision and avoids division by zero error
    if ((($timepassed / 2) * $pacefreq) < ($paceperiod * $i))
        $timeleft[$i & 1] = $sparetime;
    }
}

One problem with this is that it divides the time passed by 2, which is accurate only when each player takes exactly as long to move as the other player. It would be more accurate to count up how much time each player has individually used. So, it will normally reward both players or neither player, depending on how fast the game is moving along. It does not account for individual variation in playing speed. Because it divides time passed by two, the pace it checks for is actually half as fast as the pace specified. So, if the pace is 4 moves per week, it will reward players for moving twice a week. Without knowing how it works, you might imagine that it will enforce a certain pace. It will not do that. It will just reward players for keeping a minimum pace. When combined with other time controls that already reward players for moving quickly, it may help inflate how much time players have left. With the pace set to 4 moves per week, it will be possible to play slow, leisurely games that will take many months.

On the mindsports website, the 4 corner squares are said to be untiled

Fergus,

Something strange is going on with the comments at least on this page.  When you view What's New, you see everything.  When you launch the tournament page, however, you only see a few comments (which is normal) but they are not the most recent.

And yes, tomorrow, Sunday the 3rd :)

Is anyone else finding weird similarities between Chaturanga (Davidson's variantion) and Makruk?

Is anyone else finding weird similarities between Chaturanga (Davidson's variantion) and Makruk?

The diagram is in the comments to the Xiangqi article: https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=33312 . From its page source:

        function BadZone(x, y, piece, color) { // enforce board zones
          if(touched) return 0; // not during ShowMoves()
          if(piece == 4) return (color ? y < 5 : y > 4); // Elephant: across river
          if(piece != 3 && piece != 8) return 0; // otherwise OK if not Advisor or King
          return x < 3 || x > 5 || (color ? y < 7 : y > 2) && (board[y][x] & 511) != 8;
        }
        function Shade(x, y) {
          var col = 0;
          if(y > 4) col = !col;
          if(x > 2 && x < 6 && (y < 3 || y > 6)) col= !col;
          return col;
        }

The argument 'piece' contains the type of the moved piece, and 'color' indicates its color (non-zero = 1024 = black). The routine is called for a proposed move, so board[y][x] at this point is still the victim. I suppose the exception made for allowing a King to leave his Palace to capture the other King is not really necessary when its move is defined as WfkR; King and Advisors could simply be allowed in either Palace, as they have no moves that would bring them to the opponent Palace other than the one that must capture a King.

@ H.G. (and everyone): Thanks. It might be useful for contributors to have the instructions on how to write a CVP article linked to somehow from the CVP main page, rather than them gradually getting buried in the Comments section. Either that, or, better yet, have a 'Do you wish to submit an article' question posed in the general submission form that pops up normally when you wish to post your own game (or a preset page, etc.).

@ Ben (and everyone): Thanks. I had thought of the 'Updated' symbol as perhaps yet one more icon in the database, but I didn't know. At this point, though, I'd like to point out that whenever I have modified one of my Rules Pages for an invention of mine, it never shows a note at the bottom afterwards saying that I have modified my submission, and hence I get no 'Updated' symbol (nor showing on the What's New page is my submission icon, as a newly 'updated' item) as a result, it seems.

@ Fergus: (and everyone): Thanks. In looking at Tim O'Lena's old review of McCooey's Hexagonal Chess, it's rather long, and perhaps is not suitable for posting as an ordinary review/comment. It's more like as if it was a special review made by someone who really knew the topic (he posted links); perhaps there could still be a place for special review pages, as opposed to review comments by the average poster who may not have sought editorial approval as perhaps Tim did (I don't know). In any case, to do the sort of review Tim posted would I think now be best to do as an Article, if special review pages are no longer to be allowed to be submitted on CVP all the same.

Tim indicated much about the strategy of the game in question, which is perhaps beyond what a normal review would be, but rather it might have made for an Article instead nowadays (e.g. compare that there's an Article or two on Kriegspiel in the database, already). I'm running out of gas as far as fresh game invention ideas are concerned, and I'm toying with the idea of looking for other ways to contribute later on (hence looking at 'Items'/icons list could help rule things in or out faster). There is an old CVP Page called `How can I help` linked to somewhere, but it is now in an obscure place, and does not mention submitting e.g. Articles.

For possible future Article(s) by myself, I'm thinking about the idea of discussing strategies for a given CV(s), if I feel I'm sufficiently skilled at them to give such advice one day. Ironically I'm a chess master, which is not quite strong enough to give great chess strategy advice in print for beyond a certain level, but for little-tested CVs a certain amount of my chess skill may carry over, more usefully perhaps. Regardless, I'm not quite sure what's hoped for by editor(s) when writing a CVP Article. Maybe a policy statement about Articles could be linked to from the CVP Main Page, eventually.

Wow, you really dived deep into this. Thanks for the feedback. The 't' in XBoard was a kludge to allow approximate representation of moves that were too difficult to handle correctly, by making it possible to 'round up' the move to something that was doable, in the sense that it would include every pseudo-legal move and then some. That way the GUI would not block the entry of any legal move because it though it was not in the piece's repertoire. And then leave it to the engine to refuse the 'and some', should the user try to play it. (XBoard protocol allows engines to do such a thing.) But this strategy fails when XBoard would think one of the 'phantom' moves was checking the King. Enforcing the checking rule makes it that you have to be exactly right in your moves: if some moves are not supported, you cannot play those, but if extra moves are supported, you sometimes cannot move other pieces because it is imagined this would leave you in check. The 't' modifier was added to make it possible to selectively disable checking by all extra moves, so the latter problem cannot occur.

But the diagram does not test for full move legality; its purpose was to demonstrate how pieces move, and not showing some of the pseudo-legal moves because of checking restrictions only caused confusion. (I later added greying out King moves that directly stumble in check, to get a good representation of slider Kings that cannot pass through check, without obscuring what the pseudo-legal moves of the King really are, to do 'Caissa Brittanica'.) So the diagram does not really need the 't', as it accepts any move anyway, and the harm in highlighting spurious moves would not go away by it. And I did not know any variant that really had pieces that could not capture royals with one of their normal capture moves. So I figured the 't' was not needed.

In case of an 'emergency', there is a work-around, BTW: the diagram script looks for the presence of a user-supplied function

BadZone(x, y, piece, color)

which allows you to veto moves that the Betza encoding would allow. I used this to confine the pieces to their zones in Xiangqi, but it could also be used to veto a move because the indicated piece type cannot capture what is at square (x,y). Or to implement variants with restrictions on what can capture what, of which the 'tame' moves are just a special case. And this does affect the highlighting! (The 'k' I added to make it possible to implement the King-facing rule of Xiangqi, which was borrowed by some western chess variants as well.)

Triple moves are indeed a pain. XBoard supports those now. It would require a lot of messy code. I don't think that 'chaining' like in Paco Shako would be the simplest way to do it. It is definitely also on my wish list.

Custom definition of royal pieces is already possible, though the parameter royal=N . In the most recent version this is even implemented as setting a flag for piece type number N, rather than remembering the value of the parameter. So you can have several such lines in the diagram definition, indicating multiple royals. But since the diagram doesn't take account of the checking rule, there is not much effect of defining something as 'royal'. Only its own moves are then sometimes greyed out. And games like Chu Shogi, which do have multiple royals when you insist on representing Prince differently from King (as kanji pieces would), doesn't really have a checking rule, so that in fact the royals should not lose any moves even when they do stumble into check. The diagram doesn't test for game end.

Kevin,

Reviews should be written as comments, not as pages. The review you mentioned was written before we had a comment system in place. To distinguish your comment as a review, give it a rating, and do not rate any of your other comments on the same page. When you favorite a game and write a review for it, a review link will show up for it on your personal information page. You will also find a link to a listing of reviews on the What's New page.

Regarding the ability to let either side move first, this was criticized in the comments for Yangsi, and you removed it from that game. I hope you will do the same here.

Since your Cannon moves as a Leo, why not call it that and change your graphic images for it?

It was recently mentioned here that you can post an article in any format, by writing all text in the 'introduction' box of the submission form, and leaving the other sections empty. You would have to take care of your own section headers in that case, obviously, but the edit boxes allow you to do that even without having to touch raw HTML.

I think the icon that gets associated with it in the index (and elsewhere) is decided upon by an editor at the time he approves the submission. E.g. my Interactive Diagram article has the book-with-question-mark icon, but I never did anything special myself to get that. My 'Checkmating Applet' similarly has a black square with a white P on it.