Single Comment

Wow... So much going on here!  I have been away from chessvariants.org for
quite a long time (focusing on other things, for better or worse,) but it
is exciting for me to see so much interest in this topic.  I have been
away for too long.  I actually wrote ChessV initially because I was
inspired by Ralph Betza's work on determing values of fairy chess pieces
and Chess with Different Armies.  ChessV was intended more as a research
tool than as a Zillions-of-Games replacement.

The current state of ChessV?  Well, it's a very good program for
entertaining a human who wants a challenging opponent for a wide variety
of chess variants.  Unfortunately, although I intended it for research,
and it is not bad for that purpose, it is not great either because it
likely has some deep-rooted bugs that I am ill-equiped to fix.  For one
thing, it doesn't anticipate forced repetition draws in the appropriate
way; even if it is winning by quite a margin, it won't break the
repetition to save it's advantage.  I started on a complete re-write, but
got distracted a while ago.  Clearly, I need to get back to the grindstone
...

Thanks to everyone who is conducting research into the value of chess
pieces, and, furthermore, into the value of different variants.