Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Greg Strong wrote on Mon, May 20, 2019 10:22 PM UTC:

You are taking on a couple of difficult problems ...

Being able to mix-and-match pieces is obviously difficult and the CECP isn't really suitable for this.  External configuration with a text file is probably what is required.  It wouldn't need to be all that sophisticated if your configurablity is limited to adding new piece types.  ChessV does offer a simple scripting language that will let you accomplish this.  What it supports is hit-and-miss but just adding new (basic) piece types is no problem.  Your ski-jump move is not presently supported however.  I need to add that anyway for the Grand Accetrix Griffin, but it won't make this next release.  It has been almost a year and a half since I've put out a new version and I have added so much new stuff since then that I just need to wrap up and get it out.

Knowing when to end a game due to insufficient mating material and when to return a zero evaluation is also obviously tricky.  The currently released ChessV 2.1 doesn't do anything about this at all.  IIRC, you can be down to two kings and it'll happily wander around until the 50-move rule is triggered.  The new version is somewhat better.  It knows about endings with standard chess pieces, and even includes customized evaluation for a few combinations (KRKP, KRKB, and KRKN), plus a "mop-up" evalution for lone king vs. rook or more.  But throw in any non-standard pieces and it goes back to not making any decisions... King + Camel vs. King and you are back to wandering around for 50 moves with it stupidly thinking the side with the Camel is ahead (although it is smart enough to know that if the other side has a pawn then the side without and less than a rook's worth of material should be scaled down massively.)  I would like to program in more smarts here, too, especially in light of all your work to quantify these endings.  I now have a material hashtable so it could be done without worrying about computational cost, but probably won't get to too much of this for this version.  Looking for low-hanging-fruit, like a simple piece property that says "this piece can't mate without help."  It would be really, really awesome to make it smart enough that, when a game starts, even if it is a user-define game through an include file, it does enough endgame table generation to make some basic decisions about this stuff, but that is probably a long way off.


Edit Form
Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.