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Comments by Halfen Ludith

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Tjatoer!. A chess variant written in Python, designed to stress test engines.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Halfen Ludith wrote on Mon, Jun 28, 2021 05:43 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from Sun Jun 27 08:05 PM:

I agree that the pieces are so many that they're harder to learn, in earlier amendments I have made changes to the pieces' names before to eliminate all the piece names that are too commonplace like the Ferz to the Fürst, the Man to the Mullah, as another editor suggested (notice that I changed the piece name that is on the Piececlopedia to something that isn't on the Piececlopedia). but now I am asked to change the name of pieces that isn't on the Piececlopedia to the ones in the Piececlopedia. The basis on which I named the pieces is on the grounds of notation, purpose, and design.

Firstly, regarding notation, each piece's name's first letter (except for the regular chess knight) corresponds with its notation, and with 26 types of pieces, it fits nicely with the 26 letters of the English alphabet. I did some cross-checking with the Piececlopedia and found that even if I use the name of the piece commonly attributed with a move in the Piececlopedia, and even if I don't confine myself to the first letter of the piece, still, the letter J, S, V, W, X, and Y will not be represented. Thus some pieces must have double letters for their notation, like (A) for the amazon then (AR) for the archbishop, or have a notation of a letter that isn't on the piece name itself (in both cases, it will be more confusing don't you think?).

Secondly, regarding the purpose of the game, there is no doubt that a human needs a lot of effort to learn how to play this game, and I would be honored if anyone would take the time to learn how to play it, but for an engine (the reason I designed this variant in the first place is for engines to play it) it needs not to memorize the moves of the pieces nor its notation since a computer is just following what it is programmed to do.

Thirdly, there is the game theme and design. I named the piece to more or less correspond with its design (though some pieces correspond better than others, for example, the zorro used to be the zebra hence it is represented by a zebra). In the GitHub repository, I have provided more information on the design ideas of the pieces (how the pieces in the King's Court is designed with royalty in mind, like how the Fürst is represented by a royal West-Sumatran headpiece, how the Esquire is represented by the Isicholo, a Zulu African headdress, or how the Duchess is represented by the Kokoshnik, a Russian headdress) to change the names of the pieces means eliminating the significance of their design to their name, or to painstakingly redesign all the pieces to befit their new name from scratch will overhaul the overall theme of the game.

with that being said, as some sort of a workaround, I made a table to better understand the pieces' moves


💡📝Halfen Ludith wrote on Sun, Jun 27, 2021 03:00 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 02:05 AM:

Nice! any more amendments I should make?


💡📝Halfen Ludith wrote on Sun, Jun 27, 2021 01:01 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from Sat Jun 26 05:47 PM:

I see, well it's already in PNG format so no issue there


💡📝Halfen Ludith wrote on Sat, Jun 26, 2021 04:39 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 04:19 PM:

Sure! the color of the black pieces is now the same shade of blue as the Alfaerie fairy pieces

Secondly, the diagrams are already in PNG format, so no changes there, unless you meant the other way around since to my understanding PNGs are a lossless compressed format of images that tend to have a larger file size than JPGs that are a lossy compressed image format


💡📝Halfen Ludith wrote on Sat, Jun 26, 2021 03:48 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 03:23 PM:

I agree with the 5 fold repetition, it should stay the same as regular chess, although the reason I implemented the 100-move rule is that it acts as headroom for future engines to find longer mates, the game is already tedious to play for two humans but for engines (the reason I designed this game in the first place is to study machine learning), there some of the positions even in regular chess where mates of more than 50 moves are possible (I think we all know of the famous mate in 500 moves puzzles), and with a game this large, I bet there are more positions of that kind, so I don't want future engines to jump into conclusion to call for a draw when it sees a mate that is more than 50 moves away, and instead change their strategy to eliminate the last remaining piece of the losing side (hence the bare king rule), that being said, it is true that the counter should reset after a promotion

Regarding castling and en passant, well castling is obvious since you need to move a billion pieces to clear the way for the king, as for en passant, I figured even if the chance to do en passant occurs, it might be either too early in the game where there are adequate number of pieces to stop the passed pawn, or it's too late in the game the chance to do en passsant is astronomically low


💡📝Halfen Ludith wrote on Sat, Jun 26, 2021 02:50 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 02:02 PM:

Sure, done!


💡📝Halfen Ludith wrote on Sat, Jun 26, 2021 01:48 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 11:49 AM:

Thanks, Firstly, sure! I'll tweak some of the names, the Ferz will now be the Fürst, the Zebra will be a Zorro, the Man will be a Mullah, and the Lance will be the Lugal (Sumerian word for ruler), and that's for the pieces whose names are already attributed to well-known fairy pieces. as for pieces whose moves are already associated with a piece name, like the Gajah, Jester, Chariot, etc. I didn't change them as I thought some fairy pieces already has variations of moves

Secondly, regarding the origin of the word, the original word for chess, Catur, is a loan word from Sanskrit meaning four, it was and still Latinized to be spelled with a C (we still use the Sanskrit word as a substitute for the word four today!), anyway, so it was never spelled Tjatoer, to begin with (or at least I can't find any literary evidence it has ever been written in the van Ophuijsen spelling, back then people had more pressing matters than chess, early references to chess in Malay texts are either written in Sanskrit or Arabic letters like in Sejarah Melayu), thus unless it is a Dutch loan word the van Ophuijsen spelling is not used


💡📝Halfen Ludith wrote on Sat, Jun 26, 2021 08:00 AM UTC in reply to Ben Reiniger from 02:36 AM:

Thanks, done!


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