Comments by Matthew Montchalin

Okay, I think it works now.

I had to truncate my name by clipping a couple letters off of it.

For most of us, Internet costs money, and playing a game of Stanley Random
Chess would certainly be bound to eat up a lot of time, and therefore cost
a lot of money.  Although you said that SRC is amusing, do you really think
it is worth the money to play it?  For instance, let's put the shoe on the
other foot.  Suppose I (or someone you don't know, but whom I were to
approve of, and you had absolutely no way of locating that person) were
the one to define the 'secret rules' behind Stanley Random Chess, and
she alone were to decide on whether your moves were acceptable or not. 
That kind of a setup could certainly have the potential of driving up
costs, don't you think?  Not to mention 'bandwidth' in the form of
noise, or near-noise.

Would you still find the game amusing enough to play for a few months, or
a few years?

(Now for an 'opening the floodgates' argument:)

The next hypothetical offers us even more food for thought:  suppose a
hundred thousand people or more found my version of Stanley Random Chess
(with my own list of approved but anonymous rulemakers) engaging, would
the increased consumption of bandwidth be worth it to you, to call it
amusing?  Or, if the ante is upped to an even higher stake, would it be
worth it to society?  After all, if robots could be programmed to play
Stanley Random Chess - not that they are /that/ creative - and even if
they would be answerable to their owners alone, and not to society, would
you still find it amusing?

If an Advancer begins its turn adjacent to an enemy piece, is it allowed to
forgo movement, and instead capture the adjacent piece, refraining from
actually moving into that space? or is movement a mandatory part of the
Advancer's method of capturing?

Is it safe to move a piece up to an enemy Advancer, positioning it right
next to it, in order to hem it in?

I am not sure of where I was - I think that I was trying to access the game
logs - but when I typed in my password and clicked the 'submit' icon (or
button or whatever you call it), the following message to appeared:

Warning: usort(): The argument should be an array in
/home/chessva/public_html/play/pbmlogs/index.php on line 226

Fergus, I'm using Game Courier to play a non-serious (no time control, I
think) game of Rococo with gwduke.  We're just giving it a shot to see
how the game goes.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to write down a move for Rococo
where I move my Advancer straight across a rank, moving it towards an
enemy Cannonball Pawn, but then stopping short by 1 square.  This ought to
be enough to capture the pawn.  I was hoping the 'verify' button would
draw the board with the Advancer moved, and the Cannonball Pawn deleted. 
It doesn't do it.  The Cannonball Pawn is still there. To explain this
more fully, there is probably a help file somewhere, but slow page loading
makes it very difficult to locate. 

Here are the moves so far:

1. a2-a3, g7-g6; 2. c2-b3, e7-e6; 3. e2-f3, a7-a6; 4. h2-g3, h8-d4; 5.
e1-e2, f7-d5; 6. a3-c3, d4-a7; 7. g1-g2, a6-b6; 8. b2-a2, e6-c4; 9. h2-h4,
e8-e7

White's ninth move is a check.  Is it permissible to put a plus sign in,
or is that unnecessary surplusage?  For White's tenth move, I tried to
move h4-d4, capturing the Black Pawn at c4, but the Verify button doesn't
seem to implement the capture properly.

If all you have is a King and a Knight, I don't think you've got enough
material to mate a solitary King using traditional chess rules, even if
your opponent were to help you out and move his King where you want it to
be moved.

However, if you are playing chess on a nonstandard board, it might be
possible.  For instance, if the traditional 8x8 board had extra corners
that were squares that a King could stumble into, a 'mate' of some kind
might be possible.  Naturally, we'd be  talking about a pretty strange
chessboard - for instance, a non-euclidean board - perhaps with an extra
square just beyond each corner square - reachable by King or Knight, and
entered as though it were just another square on the diagonal.

But short of that, the simple answer to your question is: 'No - a King
and Knight cannot mate a solitary enemy King, on a traditional 8x8 board.,
with no other pieces to assist.'

Mike Howe,

Can you suggest a good, inexpensive JPEG, GIF, or PNG editor for either
Windows or DOS?

Although the graphics available here at www.chessvariants.org is suitable
for the purpose at hand, I'm tempted to try my hand at changing some of
the graphics around.  What programs do you use?

Unfortunately, my Windows computer crashes a lot.  That means working on
an ordinary 68000 system (plain vanilla ST, 2.5 megs, but at least it's
stable) or a PC that runs DOS.  Sigh.  If only my HP laserfonts from the
olden days could be modified for use on Internet, or changed around so
they could be imported into Windows - but it seems like 99 out of 100 PC
users have never even HEARD of laser font ID codes, or font management ESC
sequences, it's hopeless to even broach the subject, and have them
understand what I am talking about.)  If you remember seeing my fonts from
1988, they were actually pretty good for 300 dpi laserprinter graphics.

Fergus,
I was using your Game Courier program to play Rococo at
http://play.chessvariants.org (if I spelled that right) and elected
'mutual destruction' for my Swapper (white), and the enemy King (black)
it was standing next to.  So I entered a compound move along the lines of
@-e5; @-d6 causing both the Swapper and King to be deleted from the board
when the diagram got redrawn.

Here's my question-

Did I employ the correct notation?

The User's Guide doesn't state the procedure for declaring victory.  The
Game Courier program just wants to keep going, not realizing that Black no
longer has a King to defend.  Shouldn't there be a subroutine somewhere
checking for the existence of the King in Rococo?  At the least, the
subroutine could fall through to a status report of some kind, with an
option to back up, or log it as a victory?

In a day and age where many people think it too much work to do anything
other than rastering out a single line of pixels to the laserprinter, and
then, as needs be, repeat it, row by row, until the picture is printed, it
might go past some people - the ones that only have Windows - that there
are still some people out there who sit around loading 'softfonts' into
their memory, and then, after exporting those fonts to a laserprinter,
find it convenient to juggle them around with no more than a short ESC
sequence to effect an overall change in printout. (It sure beats having to
reload 64K of bytes every time you want to switch from italic to upright,
or from plain to bold, or large to small, including subscripts and
superscript, just to print out a document of medium complexity.)

Back in the olden days, laserprinters tended to have just enough room for
a few dozen softfonts, and the only way to get them in, was by sending ESC
codes to the laserprinter, almost always with a preliminary 'printer
reset' code consisting of two bytes:  1b 45  - so I was wondering if you
had any tips on how to modify my laserfonts from the olden days for use
with Windows?  Of course, things are more complicated than snipping off
two bytes.  It turns out that there are hosts of other ESC sequences that
need to be fixed up, or turned around.  Like whether a font is
proportional or fixed, upright or italic, that sort of thing.

When a player has won, it appears that a box ought to exist somewhere that
he can edit to say who has won, but this box never appears for me.

Exactly where can I find a box to click, that lets me declare who is the
winner?

Also, there appears to be a mysterious 'delete log' box.  Can you
explain the history behind this option?  How often does one player choose
to delete both logs?

Finally, I'd like the option to backup and allow my opponent to change
his move.  There is supposed to be a button/icon that says 'GOTO' but I
can't find it.  What part of Game Courier has this button in it?  This
option doesn't seem to be available to me anywhere, and it doesn't make
any difference whether I am white or black, I still can't figure out how
to 'backup' and let my opponent choose some other move.

This is in response to my recent game of Rococo with gwduke where I
elected to mutually destroy the white Swapper and the black King; the only
intelligent move I could see for Black was moving the black Immobilizer
back to freeze the white Swapper and prevent it from engaging in 'mutual
destruction.'

Geeeeze, I hope I am not the only one who is having trouble with
www.chessvariants.org.  I keep running into the following browser problem
with my game of Rococo with gwduke:

  'Your browser was not refreshed when you entered this move.  If this
move had not been stopped, you would have overwritten your log with data
for a past move, causing you to lose moves in your game. Go back and
refresh the log page before entering your move.'

Well, I've gone back to the log page four times, and I'm still getting
the same error message.  No matter how many times I go to the 'log page'
and sign in, I keep getting the same error message.  What good will it do
me to attempt to 'refresh the log page' one more time?

The Game Courier program expects the user to type out a URL manually each
time a move is logged.  I've always looked on that part of the interface
with an element of suspicion, in much the same way I look at Java applets
and other webbrowsing features with suspicion.  If Fergus can't come up
with an alternative to submitting game moves than typing a web address or
URL in manually, I guess I just won't be willing to use Game Courier any
more to transmit the moves.  (I suppose I could still post my moves here
in the Comments area, although that prevents me from looking at the
chessboard diagrams at the same time.)

Maybe this is just a West Coast to East Coast thing, assuming the site is
actually being maintained on computers in New York?  I'm certainly not in
a position to authenticate (let alone inspect) the actual packets that are
being swapped from server to server, to get my data over to New York... 
(And then people wonder why I don't trust this newfangled world wide web
stuff....)

Is there any way to change the defaulting font for Game Courier?  I made
the mistake of starting a game of Ultima with the Alfaerie font, and find
myself now stuck with it.  I find myself constantly having to click the
other optional fonts, trying to fix the original mistake.  Is there
anywhere I can click to change the default, so I don't have to do this
every time I view the board?

Where can I find the formula for determining the players' ratings?

Is there such a thing as a performance rating, and a provisional rating?

All other things being equal, two computers that are both capable of 2 ply
searches, and make their moves accordingly, with absolutely no regard to
positional nuances, only material differences, ought to be rated 1200.  If
they are capable of 3 ply searches, then their ratings ought to be rated
1300.  Similarly, a computer capable of a 4 ply search should be rated
1400. By allowing computers to play against live humans, an exponential
standard of sorts could be established for measuring human excellence.