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It would be spamming to post my moves here, maybe I can make an account!

Best way for Aurelian to communicate the moves would be for him to register too, start a game between the two of you, and let him play his moves whenever it is his turn.

The scores should only appear when you load a game that was broadcasted. (These have the engine scores as comments to the moves.) Probably they are not cleared when you load a non-broadcasted game after that; this counts as a bug. Just ignore them, like you should also ignore the PV fields for white and black. This is all stuff I added later to the page, in order to use the turn-based server also for broadcasting comp-comp games.

I will do so in the morning if that's ok :)!

That's fine. Just leave a message once you have your username, and I'll setup a new game with the moves we've made so far. I believe the game so far is:

White      Black
Aurelian   VReinhart
1.d4    ...Nf6
2.e4    ...Nxe4
3.Reject...d6

Since we don't have a working board diagram yet you don't need to make your next move yet. Once I setup the game with your and my usernames, I'll setup the game from here and we can keep playing.

Just for the record, my moves are chosen by the computer but the computer thinks it is playing chess, but we are really playing Refuse Chess.

Well, it should be clear by now that Aurelian is not very eager to participate in this. Because I realized that beating a naive computer is even more trivial then I thought, I now started a game against you on the turn-based server, and played 1.e4. So you can have the computer play against me, if you want. When the game is done, we can post it here.

Actually I forgot, but I'm happy with the way things turned out. Also I play many, many games now on game courier so that's that. Moreover I'm guessing that you are stronger than me HG in regular chess as I am a very poor calculator, although my strategy is ok, not brilliant but ok. But I honestly, and I hope I don't disturb you in any way V., don't understand how you would properly play refusal chess with an engine that was not specifically designed to do that. I'd like to reiterate my belief that this is not difficult to do, but it is still a thing "to do".  I'm more concerned about making the game work as the idea is very good but not polished. I hope your game could shed som light on that, too :)!

Ok, I believe I played a move. This should be an interesting experiment. For the record, I'm playing the "computer" where the computer believes it is playing normal chess.

For clarity, the way I'm using an engine is that it plays the best move. If that gets rejected, then it plays the next best move. It also accepts or rejects moves using this same logic.

(If nothing else, this has gotten HGM to play a game, who I believe doesn't frequently play games on public forums. Hooray!)

I've gotton busy with other stuff so I plan to usually only play one move per day.:)

Good luck to all competitors! I believe HG to be clever enough to come up with the trick I came up and beat the computer, as it is not build for such games :)!

Hmm, there is a small problem that I had not foreseen. If a player makes a capture, and it gets refused, this cannot be done by simply making the reverse move: the captured piece will not come back. I can solve that by altering the game into a drop game, with unlimited pieces in hand, so that you could drop the captured piece back. This is a bit cumbersome, though. Perhaps it is better if we tell the opponent in advance when we are going to refuse a capture. (E.g. through the chat.) This will also speed up the game, as we can immediately do a move that will not be refused, rather than having to wait an extra roudtrip.

E.g. after the already played 1. e4 c5 2. Qh5, I expect the computer to play 2... d3 (to protect the c4 Pawn). Then I would say "3. Qxf7+ {refuse 3... Kxf7}", so black can immediately play Kd7 (the only legal alternative, which I now cannot refuse, as I already used up my refusal pre-emptively). Then I can continue with "4. Qxd8+ {refuse 4... Kxd8}", etc.

Ok that's fine. If the commputer makes a capture I'll inform you rather than playing the move (and wait if you reject it or not).

Stockfish (set to level 10) actually plays e6 (another way to protect the pawn, as you predicted it will do). It did accept your move because Qh5 (by normal chess) is not the best move.

Well, as I had already written (in the chat) that I would refuse 2... e6, you can try again now.

I'm not sure what is going on at the game. The pgn doesn't seem to match the board position. I (the engine) tried to play 3.Nf6 but I'm not sure if it accepted it or not. It doesn't show that on the diagram.

I believe this is the gams so far:
1.e4...c5
2.Qh5...e6
3.(refuse)...Nf6

It is not clear what you mean with 3. (refuse)... Nf6 . Was the knight move a white move or a black move?

For move 2, White played Qh5, and then Black played e6.
For move 3, White refused Black's move, and then Black played Nf6.

At each move, each player can do one thing - same as normal chess.

Wouldn't this be the normal way to notate a game of Refusal chess? Maybe the parenthesis aren't needed. Does this look better?

1.e4...c5
2.Qh5...e6
3.Refuse...Nf6

Are you sure you flushed your browser cash? It seems an empty move was submitted to the server, instead of Nf6. This could have come about by a bug in the script for that page, which I fixed two days ago: it was periodically refetching the game from the server to see if your opponent moved, and then automatically show you that move. But it should not have done that when it is your turn to move. For one, it would be pointless. But it caused the move that you just played on the board to clipped off the game again, when it refetched the game from the server before you could press 'Play Move'. This could have happened to you, if you are still using the script from before I fixed this (because of browser caching).

Anyway, I repaired the game on the server, adding 4... Nf6, and played my own move. Note that I am going to refuse a capture now (see chat).

@V. ,

Ok, thanks, now I understand :)!

Perhaps it would be more intuitive to write 'undo' instead of 'refuse'. The turn-based-server page, which was not specifically made for Refusal Chess, considers the 'undo' a normal move: it wrote ee7 (SAN for e6-e7; it adds a disambiguator to indicate which Pawn moves to e7, because none of the black Pawns can move there legally). It will disambiguate the moves in the normal SAN way, though, assuming that you know which color is performing the move. Which in this case is not true.

About clearing browser cash - I never do that, I don't even know how. Is it "Ctrl-f5" (maybe varies with OS?)? I'll hit that next time if there's problems.

When using the nubati server, we can "undo" moves because that's what were doing. (I haven't done it yet because engine-player has not requested it yet)

But when producing pgn notation (to describe games), I think "Refuse" or "Reject" is better because that is the terminology used historically, and I believe it matches the intention of the author(s). But either way is ok for me.:)

Sorry to be pedantic, but it's cache, not cash. To address your actual question, you flush the cache via Alt-F5.

Thanks Nicolino, I appreciate the info.

I've been watching some of the Top-10 chess engine tournament, and am also swamped with my normal work, so have been playing slow. But I have not forgotten about this game.:)

What top 10 chess engine tournament are you talking about?

chess.com just held a 4-day tournament of the top chess engines. Three days were qualifying rounds. The match between the top two engines was just finished today (20 more games to determine the best engine).

I can reveal the result, but it might be better for visitors to just go there. There is video commentary, chat forums, and a pgn file of all the games. It will probably continue to be discussed and analyzed for several more days.:)

Link is here:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-com-announces-computer-chess-championship

I'm whatching the TCEC championship which seems to be a mote detailed competition :)!

That's interesting too.  I actually prefer games with longer time control.

But I did like the chess.com live commentary - like watching a baseball game with experts discussing the games. I think they did a pretty good job overall considering it was the first year.