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Comments by DerekNalls
SMIRF
. Program that plays various 8x10 chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]SMIRF http://www.chessbox.de/Compu/schachsmirf_e.html This is currently the strongest program available that is free and fully-functional for playing ALL Capablanca chess variants. It loads Embassy Chess (MBC) and several other games automatically at the push of a button. Gothic Chess, having a US patent, requires payment. Allegedly, the best opening setup is found in this game: Optimized Chess 8H x 10W http://www.symmetryperfect.com/shots/opti/ Of course, there are many ways to approach 'big-board CV's'.
Optimized Chess - 8H x 10W
. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]You make a very good point I had failed to consider. I apologize for my mistake. I intended no harm. The SMIRF download at my Opti Chess web page has been removed while the invitation to visit your SMIRF web page remains. I trust this arrangement is now to your liking.
'Can't get SMIRF to work because there is a dll missing.' ____________________________________________________ Please notify the developer of SMIRF, Reinhard Scharnagl. He really cares about correcting flaws. Meanwhile ... 1. Try to run the program again. [Note- It will not run.] 2. Write down the name of the missing file when the error message pops-up. 3. Download the missing file for free from any of several web sites that provide this service. 4. Repeat process until all missing files are retrieved and the program runs. Dependencies are required, supporting files. This is a list of dependencies for 'SmirfGUI.exe'- activeds.dll adsldpc.dll advapi32.dll apphelp.dll borlndmm.dll cabinet.dll cc3270mt.dll comctl32.dll comdlg32.dll crypt32.dll dbghelp.dll dbrtl100.bpl dnsapi.dll gdi32.dll imagehlp.dll kernel32.dll lz32.dll mlang.dll mpr.dll msasn1.dll msi.dll msimg32.dll msvcrt.dll netapi32.dll netrap.dll ntdll.dll ntdsapi.dll ole32.dll oleacc.dll oleaut32.dll oledlg.dll rpcrt4.dll rtl100.bpl samlib.dll secur32.dll setupapi.dll sfc.dll sfcfiles.dll shell32.dll shlwapi.dll user32.dll userenv.dll vcl100.bpl vcldb100.bpl version.dll w32topl.dll winmm.dll winspool.drv wintrust.dll wldap32.dll ws2_32.dll ws2help.dll wsock32.dll The list of dependencies for 'SmirfEngine.dll' is unneeded since all of those files are already included in the first list.
SMIRF. Program that plays various 8x10 chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]This is a request for future versions of SMIRF. A 4th castling option would be useful occasionally: no castling. Corner Chess 8 x 8, my first (and worst) chess variant ever invented is a game where only standard chess pieces are used in which castling is totally unnecessary. [The king is very well protected at the opening setup.] Corner Chess 8 x 8 /play/erf/CornerCh.html
I never even saw those black dots in any game that index the pieces involved in castling because I chose a black border (for my board). Besides, SMIRF cannot enable castling with the strange opening setup used in Corner Chess 8 x 8 even as the symbol for a castling option must exist within the X-FEN string. Nevermind! All is well.
Janus Chess. Variant on 10 by 8 board. (10x8, Cells: 80) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]It is almost unbelievable to me that anyone knowledgeable, especially GM Adorjan, can be arrogant and insulting enough to think virtually all of the rest of us (whom I regard as knowledgeable ... to varying degrees) are believing a 'delusion' and suffering from 'mass psychosis'.
The first-move-of-the-game advantage for white in Chess with a white-black turn order is well-established statistically over a vast number of games at the highest levels of tournament competition. Furthermore, you had better believe that all of the players, whether assigned white or black, were trying their hardest to win. They would never have reached tournament levels in Chess in the first place with the defeatist attitude, 'Damn! I'm playing black. I might as well give-up or only try for a draw at most'.
By the way, the high complexity of the game and the great impact a mere 50 ELO points can make in your chances for victory are totally seperate issues from white's advantage. Most of us do not need to write 2 books if our goal is only to say something ridiculously stupid that defies proven facts. It is wise not to uncritically believe everything you read.
'Statistical results do not disprove that such an effect is not at work ... the subconcious is powerful.' ______________________________ Yes, you make a worthy point but ... The first-move-of-the-game advantage for white is real- NOT merely an imaginary, psychosomatic condition suffered by black. Everyone (except a certain GM) can see and feel it when they play. White controls the tempo the first and most important time in the game. Moreover, there is no assurance that black will get to control the tempo an equal number of times. Does anyone contend that the tempo is trivial? White chooses and dictates the opening that black must defend against and so, shapes the entire game. White acts and black reacts as it must ... repeatedly. If black does not defend soundly, the advantage of white increases further which will give white opportunities to increase it even further and will probably, eventually lead to black's loss of the game. Although chess is intractable, some trivial games similar to chess with fewer pieces and small boards have been demonstrated to have greater (if not absolute) first-move-of-the-game advantages for white than chess via powerful computers. So, the applicability of this concept to chess variants with the white-black turn order has been tentatively established- zugzwang-for-white, badly designed games being the important exception.
Pre-Grandchess. Eric Greenwood realized that Christian Freeling's Great Chess could have arisen with this more normal looking position.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Yes, thanks to Jeremy Good once again. [You are too nice and too hard working.]
Abstract Chess Pieces. Icons of chess and chess variant pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I prefer to think of the linear piece symbols used for 2-D sliders within my games as concrete. Since they are directly intuitive with the directions of movement each piece is capable of evident within its icon, they do not require arbitrary, counter-intuitive memorization as some of your abstract chess pieces do. Hence, their meaning is unmistakably obvious even to an intelligent child.
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I notice that your documentation accompanying the ChessV 0.9 program is a Microsoft Word file (*.doc). If you, as an author, prefer an Adobe Acrobat file (*.pdf) which preserves the exact graphic representation of the document as you saw it and wrote it (without any possible font substitutions), then I would be glad to send you my Adobe Acrobat 4.0 (Standard) Full on 1 CD which I have recently replaced with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard Full. Most readers (myself included) prefer *.pdf files because they open faster and are very flexible upon display. I think it is probably compatible with whatever version of Microsoft Windows NT you are using. If you issue a mailing address for you to me privately via my E-mail address, then I can send it to you immediately USPS. Rest assured, it is authentic software, still in perfect condition.
Calculation of Piece Values 
. Link to an essay on attack values, material values, relative piece values.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Although the method can be adapted to hexagonal-spaced boards, doing so is a significant extra effort that I do not consider justified. Generally, hexagon and triangle spaced games are unstable and/or inferior compared to square spaced games. Even if this is not the case with Glinski's in particular, games based upon hexagonal spaces still have no special interest to me personally.
Feel free to apply the method to all games that interest you and publish the results to the benefit of other likeminded individuals. That is what I most want people to do. To learn it and use it. That is why I published it. No need to publish it if I just do it myself every time someone asks.
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] SMIRF. Program that plays various 8x10 chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Aside from a brief, cryptic note left by Reinhard Scharnagl at this web site, I have no idea why ChessBox & SMIRF have disappeared. Does anyone really know anything about this mystery? ChessBox http://www.chessbox.de
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Congratulations! Welcome back. Is this new web site safe from saboteurs?
Ministers Chess. Two queens on each side on a 9x9 board, available commercially.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The inventor claims that the both-bishops-bound-to-the-same-color problem is fixed by a special move that allows a bishop to shift one space to the opposite spacing (dark to light for both players). In fact, moves themselves are too valuable of a resource in chess-related games for this special move to entirely compensate the imbalance (at the cost of 1 move). Thus, the dark spaces still possess some pre-eminence in bishop power.
SMIRF. Program that plays various 8x10 chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]SMIRF http://www.10x8.net The new SMIRF pages are up and running as well. This is a mirror web site to the old SMIRF pages.
Please let me explain another way ... The purpose of SMIRF is to fairly play ALL 960 FRC starting positions and ALL 12,118 CRC starting positions equally and extraordinarily well. Obviously, it would be impossible to generate high-quality opening books of adequate depth and width for all of these 1000's of games within a survivable time. So, to attempt such a project is not even being realistically considered. Moreover, some people are skeptical that any of the starting positions with FRC pieces upon the 8x8 board or CRC pieces upon the 10x8 board are at all or significantly superior compared to other unknown permutations. In other words, they do not consider Chess any better than the other 959 FRC variants nor do they consider any of the 2 dozen CRC variants given names by their inventors any better than the other 12,000+ CRC variants. [Personally, I think otherwise that Chess & Opti Chess are the best FRC & CRC games, respectively. In the latter case, I admittedly lack impersonal objectivity.] In my playtesting experience, SMIRF is vastly better than merely 'an impractical experiment that plays Chess poorly' as you describe it (more or less). You are missing the point. You obviously do not fully understand that there is a strong correlation between the quality of moves generated by a pure search intelligence program (such as SMIRF) and the time, plies or positions that must be invested to achieve worthwhile results. When testing one program against another or testing one set of material values for pieces against another using the same program, I NEVER use a time per move of less than 1 hour ... running a dual-CPU (2.4 Ghz per CPU) server. I regard quickly-obtained results as random, too replete with bad moves and analytically uninteresting (since a sub-genius such as I could have won the game playing either side). Given reasonable conditions, SMIRF & ChessV make moves well beyond my capacity as a player. By comparison, the Zillions Of Games program makes bad moves even when given 24 hours per move or more.
How much faster do you estimate that SMIRF will run on RISC-architecture, Mac hardware and OS than CISC-architecture, IBM-compatible hardware with MS Windows?
Experiments in Symmetry. Several experimental games to test whether perfect symmetry makes a game better.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Large Variants Mirror West Chess This game extends the board to 10 files by 8 ranks, giving each player 1 extra queen and 1 extra king. White's first rank is RNBQKKQBNR and black's is symmetric to it. Hence, the name as the western 5 files from Chess are mirrored and duplicated. Each player gets 10 pawns. The 2 kings should be royal on an extinction basis with the loss of the first king [whichever one] not stopping the game but loss of the second king causing the loss of the game. For the purposes of comparison to Chess, I am displeased with this alteration to the game-ending condition but I see no way to avoid it while preserving all of the original pieces with their original opening setup and original numbers as much as possible. Notwithstanding, Mormon Chess is arguably a better game for the purposes of comparison because the game-ending condition is not altered. Essentially, 'long-side' castlings to both sides would be accommodated, each involving a different king and rook. This game could be implemented using the Zillions Of Games program but not using SMIRF or ChessV due to their intolerance for more than 1 king.
Apparently, there are no longer any active moderators watching the Yahoo group 'Chess Variants'. The group is receiving off-topic, spam messages which are being allowed to stay prominantly displayed and unless deleted, in the permanent record.
Improved Chess. An improvement of standard chess: a blocked pawn on the far side gets extra jump moves to empty squares (with zrf).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Yes, the original pawns in chess are poorly designed and an improved buffer piece ('pawn', if you wish) will improve the game significantly. Winther's analyses are typically sound and I trust that he has accomplished 'improved chess' with the substitution of the 'improved pawn'.
There are many different ways to modify a pawn or design a buffer piece, though. I think some are even better than the way Winther has invented.
1. Please check-out the archived discussion entitled Alternative Pawns
2. Please download and study the variants of Opti Chess that feature 'ortho pawns' and 'lateral pawns' from Zillions Of Games
3. Please read The Reasons Behind Opti Chess
esp. from the 6th paragraph to its end where the value of pawn protection at the starting position to stable game design is explained.
Note that 'ortho pawns' and 'lateral pawns' improve game stability, increase the defensive strength of both players and reduce the first-move-of-the-game-advantage (for white) by protecting each other at the starting position.
Please consider admitting variants of Improved Chess that include 'ortho pawns' and 'lateral pawns'?
There are many different ways to modify a pawn or design a buffer piece, though. I think some are even better than the way Winther has invented.
1. Please check-out the archived discussion entitled Alternative Pawns
2. Please download and study the variants of Opti Chess that feature 'ortho pawns' and 'lateral pawns' from Zillions Of Games
3. Please read The Reasons Behind Opti Chess
esp. from the 6th paragraph to its end where the value of pawn protection at the starting position to stable game design is explained.
Note that 'ortho pawns' and 'lateral pawns' improve game stability, increase the defensive strength of both players and reduce the first-move-of-the-game-advantage (for white) by protecting each other at the starting position.
Please consider admitting variants of Improved Chess that include 'ortho pawns' and 'lateral pawns'?
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