Ratings & Comments

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 include chess3 commented out. This is the include file that would have the P subroutine defined in it. So, including it should eliminate this error.

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.

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?

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.

@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?

@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!...

@ 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:]

Xiangqi Based Variants

@ 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.

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 :)!

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".)

@ 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.

Which reminds me, I'm putting together an outline for Game Courier Tournament 2019 now.  Stay tuned!

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 :)!

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

Indeed, that is a very useful feature!

I now uploaded the EGT.html to the Interactive Diagrams membergraphics folder. It can be linked to from the Piececlopedia pages, with the arguments to specify the move, name and symbol for the piece in question through the parameters 'betza', 'name' and 'img' (where the latter should be the root Alfaerie name, i.e. without the w/b prefix and extension). I guess we would want to do this both for pieces with general mating potential, and pieces that can only force mate in exceptional cases, but perhaps through different remarks. E.g.

• This piece can almost always force checkmate on a bare king. Try it!
• This piece can only force checkmate on a bare king from some very favorable positions. Try it!
• It is not possible to deliver checkmate with just this piece and a King.

I also submitted an article, called 'Checkmating Applet', with the more general version of the applet that I had on my website. This includes the interface for defining piece moves. (I left out the button for some specific (mainly Musketeer Chess) pieces.)

While doing this it turned out the form for editing a submission has a pretty bad bug: in the first draft I had forgotten to adapt some links, and it included a header that turned out redundant. But when I try to edit, the edit window initializes each time with the first version I submitted, reverting all the changes I made in previous edit sessions, I then have to redo all these, and not forget a single one, or I would be back to square a1...

(And, a little hack for more flexible formatting: if the Introduction section is the only non-empty one in a member submission, the header is suppressed, and you can use your own html headers directly.)

Oh wow, I didn't know that!  Thanks :)

That was my understanding of how Fergus reworked the upload script.  I've put such a placeholder file there, so we'll see soon whether that's right.

I could see the checkmating applet fitting in its own page.  If nothing else, that'd be a little more convenient for linking to, and would give it its own index entry for comments.

(And, a little hack for more flexible formatting: if the Introduction section is the only non-empty one in a member submission, the header is suppressed, and you can use your own html headers directly.)

@HG

By the way in the definition of the default file as it is downloaded you are trying to define an U (probably an unicorn or nightrider) but you are just putting down another knight. An extra "s" is required maybe. That is for future not carefull users. Also for the V and S pieces you defined an camel zebra compound twice. No ideea what is all that about :)!

Thanks!

The actual thing I'd like to use if for is to test the 5 man endgames for my 2 apothecaries games.

That is beyound the scope of the program as the 2 apothecary games are 10x10 and even worse it uses the joker (fool, imitator) which is not being defined in FairyGen.

But there seems to be enough information for me to build the program myself for a more general purpose. The main dificulty is probably the board representation as an 64 structure bits is not usefull any more. The joker implementation should be more staightforward but there maybe have to be some recurrence there too. I still have not though about it :)!

@Aurelian:

FairyGen can be downloaded from http://hgm.nubati.net/fairygen.zip . The archive contains a README.txt with an extensive description for how to use it.

@Ben:

This is a nice idea. But I think the initial posting would still need editor assistance to upload it as an attachment, as *.html is not one of the allowed file types in the upload script. Fergus made some special provision in that script which allowed me to update the /membergraphics/MSinteractive-diagrams/betza.js file, and I hope this works by allowing the use of any filename that already exists, so that it would also work for an already-present .html file. (I have no way to test that, though.)

So perhaps you should just put a (dummy) file /membergraphics/MSinteractive-diagrams/EGT.html on the server, so I can update it to the real version, and later edit it when necessary. I don't think there is any need to create a separate member-submitted article just for the purpose of hosting the EGT.html attachment; I would not really know what to write in there, and the article format enforced on member submissions is not very suitable for anything other than chess-variant descriptions anyway.

Would it be better to work in as something you can edit directly later?  IIRC, the way your interactive diagrams are hosted through a post-your-own-page attachment?  I think we can reindex correctly; I'll look into that later, but want to throw the idea out now in case you see another problem with it.