Ratings & Comments

Hello. I'm the creator of ChessCraft. I can't seem to figure out how to edit this page though. I'd like to add some details (it's also available on Steam, creator's name, slightly better description of what it does, etc).

I played four more games of Chess between my two computers today, and the results were more inconclusive. With 2 seconds of thinking time, each played White once, and White won both games. With 3 seconds of thinking time, my new computer won as Black, but the game was a draw when it played White. These results give a slight edge to the new computer, but the results were closer than yesterday. It's probably thanks to the collapse of Moore's Law that the CPU cores in my new computer are not leaps and bounds better than the ones I got 12 years ago. This is why CPUs started to increase in number of cores instead of in clock speed.

I discovered one last bug. The highlights of the crosses for the royal pieces and anti-trading rules are no longer being displayed correctly.

Bug Example shown below. To replicate, simply move the Lions close to each other or the King close to an enemy piece.

seems I inadvertantly deleted too much in the latest patch; the routine Illegal(), which tests legality, was no longer called at all.

I fixed that now.

WHITE TO PLAY AND WIN (FIDE Chess position by Troitsky)

But there is no winning plan for the same position on the first board of a game of Alice Chess, as after 1. Ne4 d2 2. Nf6+ Kh8 3. Ne7 d1=Q 4. Ng6 the Black King is not even in check. Note that the Black KIng is inverted in the second diagram to indicate that it is the solitary piece on the second Alice Chess board.

Ironwood

But with shuffle.

It should not come as a surprise that elementary end-games can be completely different in Alice Chess. The pieces only superficially mimic the orthodox pieces, but in fact are completely different beasts: they are al locusts, which capture in passing, and should end on an empty square. So one cannot assume end-games like KBBK, KBNK or KNNK get the same result as in orthodox Chess. I am not sure if it has ever been studied whether these end-games are general wins.

KRK (and hence KQK) seems winnable, because a King is rather vulnerable in Alice Chess: it is not only forbidden to end on a square that is attacked, but also to pass through one. So Alice pieces are pretty good at confining a King; it does not really matter which board they are on. That means a Rook confines a King just like it would in orthodox Chess, and putting the Rook on the same rank or file as the bare King while you have opposition drives the bare King back in the same way, even if it would not actually check because it is on the other board. So the technique is pretty much the same.

Only for delivering the mate you have to be careful that the Rook actually checks, or it would be stalemate. Which is not entirely trivial, because pieces cannot triangulate in Alice Chess. But when a bare King gets confined to a1-b1 with the other King on b3, a Rook on the c-file can either go to c1 in one or two moves to get it on the right board, and to make sure the bare King is on a1 in both cases an extra King move b3-a3 can be played

The Troitsky study exploit the fact that two Knights can easily force stalemate, so that KNNK would be won if stalemate did not cause an instant draw (e.g. because it is an instant win, or forces the opponent to pass a turn). The extra Pawn provides moves that spoil the stalemate to achieve a similar effect, giving one of the Knights time to manoeuvre to the mating square while the black King stands trapped in a corner. But there still is a deadline in achieving this, as at some point the Pawn will promote, and the moves of the resulting Queen will no longer be irrelevant.

In the shown position the Knight is just in time to deliver mate before the Queen can be used, but in Alice Chess ends up on the wrong board for delivering check. But when Ne5 would have started on the other board, the line from the orthodox study would work just as well. Problem is that the Knight cannot triangulate, so you cannot get it to the same square in an odd number of moves to swap boards. So you should somehow force the black King to triangulate.

The problem in the Troitsky study is that the mate is really occurring in the wrong corner, far away from the Pawn, so that the other Knight (which must keep blocking the Pawn until the mate is only two moves away) cannot be used in the confinement, and you have very little control over what the black King does. So if there is a winning strategy here, it must be through driving the bare King to h1 wint King plus a single Knight, making use of the fact that f1, f3 and e4 form a no-go area for the bare King. In that corner you could use the 'free' Knight to guard h3, while moving Kg3-f2 to effectively lose a tempo:

I am not sure whether this will be possible. (And it also depends on whether the bare King arrived in the corner on a board where Nf3 would check it, or black would not be forced into the corner, but would advance his Pawn.) It would be interesting to generate End-Game Tables for Alice Chess. Since the Alice board has 2x64 cells, this would be harder than for orthodox Chess: each extra chess man gives another doubling of the size. For checkmating a bare King it doesn't matter on which board the other King is, though. So tables for end-games like KBNK are 8-times larger than for orthodox Chess.

I think the more important question is whether (some of the) power pieces should be subject to some anti-trading. In original Dai this was not the case, but that could be one of the reasons it was replaced by Chu in terms of popularity. Tenjiku Shogi also has no anti-trading rules. But I actually played that, and even after trading away the Fire Demons and neutralizing the danger of the jumping generals it remains an enormously tense game, because you can get back a Fire Demon through promotion. Which creates an immediately winning imbalance. The Water Buffalo's themselves are only average pieces (by Tenjuku standards), and are not easily traded. So equiping some less important pieces with decisive promotions might be an alternative to anti-trading for keeping a large game exciting.

I think I will go down the Tenjiku path with Reiwa Dai Shogi, but include moves that reference all the moves found in the historical large variants in some way (including Ko and Taikyoku Shogi), but perhaps in more modest amounts. Here are some of my ideas for the new moves:

• Half-Hook Move (RyasRyasW or ByasByasF), a more workable version of the normal Hook Move.
• Jumping Igui (cabS, cabD, cabA, cabN), referencing Ko Shogi's shooting pieces
• Burn (spellZone = F or W)
• Some sort of sliding jump to reference Tenjiku Shogi's jumping sliders
• Some sort of area move to reference Tenjiku Shogi's area move

Since the website was down for most of yesterday and part of today, I have reduced the time taken by moves interrupted by this downtime by 24 hours, which is a longer period of time than the the site was actually down.