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

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Jul 29, 2023 10:22 AM UTC in reply to Bob Greenwade from Fri Jul 28 02:39 PM:

I don't suppose the succession parameter can get the Prince to promote upon the King's capture? (And likewise the Princess and Queen.)

What succession=N does is to generate moves that swap the King with a piece of the indicated successor type and search those, after the search of all other moves has left the score at minus 'infinity' (meaning no legal moves and no draw by stalemate). That it has to scan the board for that is of no importance, as this code is almost never reached.

What you want (if I understood it) is far more complex, as capture of the King should normally abort further search with a +infinity score (flagging the preceding move as illegal), unless the previous position was done in a checkmated position (which it would not know yet at that point).

Funny enough the Princess promotion would be easy to do with some custom scripting. The ID calls a custom function (if one is supplied) for every move it generates, which could then tinker with the generated move. This function could test for capture of a Queen, and in that case add promotion of the Princess to the move encoding. The parameter trackPieces should make location of the Princess available resonably cheaply, so that this doesn't cause too much of a slowdown.

The difference is that exposing the Queen to capture is allowed at any time. But exposing the King to capture is allowed only when checkmated. This latter requirement is the hard part.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Vanguard Chess

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.