Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Kevin Pacey wrote on Sat, May 27, 2017 04:31 PM UTC:

At the risk of getting side tracked Fergus, I can see how a fairly large body of tentative opening theory might quickly be developed for a given chess variant. Get two (or more) fairly strong and seperate fairy chess engines to play each other many, many games of the variant, at a brisk (but not quite blitz, perhaps) time control, and put the games into a large database over time. Initially have each engine give an evaluation on the position following each sequence of moves from the start of a given game, after a certain number of moves, but only permantly record the winning engine's evaluation (in case of a draw, use the average evaluation of the two engines). Then anyone might study a portion of the database results at leisure, and decide what to trust or perhaps even write books about as far as a variant's opening theory is concerned.

In the case of chess, I use a certain opening database program that includes an engine's evaluation of a position at more or less almost every point of a sequence of possible chess openings (at least the fairly major ones; many human evaluation symbols are thrown in for comparison too), so the idea I put forward in the paragraph above may not be that unrealistic conceptually anyway. A serious drawback that the chess opening database has which I use, as far as I'm concerned, is that it does not helpfully point out when a position is a forced draw, let alone if it's a drawish position that's hardly worth playing out for a chess master at least, though even chess books by humans often fail to point such things out.


Edit Form
Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.