Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To Derek Nalls wrote on Sat, Jul 28, 2007 09:47 PM UTC:We all agree that the relative piece values for FRC and CRC (to a lesser extent) are reasonably well-established. I think we should reaffirm WHY (even if it seems too obvious to some of us) in order to pinpoint what important steps need to be taken to bring other desirable chess variants into our realm of understanding. Thru much human effort, relative piece values for Chess (FRC) were understood with only a little less accuracy than today long before chess computers and programs attained impressive playing strength. Notwithstanding, powerful computers and AI programs are now available and affordable even to individuals in the modern era. Accordingly, I think this great resource should never be neglected and furthermore, should be regarded as indispensible to our future endeavors. Even in the absence of any predictive theory, a powerful program, custom-written to play a single chess variant as well as possible, can determine the correct relative piece values for an entire lineup of pieces. The greater the depth (in plies), time or number of positions searched per move throughout a playtested game, the more narrowly it can define the range of correct values for each unique piece (although a tantalizingly-large, range of values remains with any game playtested at survivable times using today's state-of-the-art technology). Since FRC & CRC are fairly, closely related, it seems probable that no predictive, universal model for relative piece values will mature until additional reliable, experimental testbeds involving less-related chess variants have been created to test results against. Forget about the Zillions Of Games program. It only plays chess variants that are closely related to Chess reasonably well- NOT great!- when given a lot of time per move. The less related a given chess variant is to Chess, the worse the ZOG program plays to the point of taking an enormous amount of time to make poor moves. The recent development of achieving within-range relative piece values for CRC is a useful roadmap. How did it happen? Out of appr. 8 billion people worldwide, an adequate number of individuals took an interest in learning to play one of a few popular Capablanca Chess variants very well. A minority of these chess variant players succeeded at their goal. For whatever reasons, three programs were written and made available for free for the worldwide popular IBM-compatible, MS Windows configuration that the best human players confirmed to be strong. In the course of making each of these three programs as strong as possible at playing one another and some of the best human players, the relative piece values for CRC were refined to the point that improvements in playing strength no longer came easily and quickly with adjustments. How many efforts of this magnitude is the worldwide chess variant community capable of? In any case, we need at least a few more. Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID Shatranj Values does not match any item.