Ratings & Comments

I wonder if it would be worth it to support mandatory capture in the Interactive Diagram. Removing all non-captures from the move list if there is a capture in it would not be that difficult. If that doesn't leave any move (which normally would indicate the side to move is mated), it could undo that, so the search can use non-captures. I have no feeling what this would do for the piece values, though. And it would only work if the rule applies to pseudo-legal captures. (Which would be fine for games like Suicide Chess, which do not have royalty in the first place.)

If non-captures would be allowed when pseudo-legal captures are possible, but all illegal, it would be a bit harder. Whether a move is legal would only become clear after searching it deep enough to see the replies. I guess it could start the same way, though, suppressing all non-captures in the first few depth iterations it does for each position. If at the depth where illegality of captures can be seen no legal moves remain, it should get a second chance to re-enable the non-captures.

Of course we could try to generalize the rule and refine it, by allowing type specifity. E.g. a new symbol in the captureMatrix could indicate which captures are mandatory. Then you could define f.e. pieces that must be captured whenever the opportunity arises ('Sirenes'?), or pieces than must capture whenever they can ('Maniacs'?).

I configured it myself. It is possible to train an NNUE for a custom variant for Fairy-Stockfish, so if someone were to do that, we could probably have much better version that should understand the value of the pieces and king safety properly. Unfortunately, I do not have the hardware to train it right now.

All is cool, but I master GC preset.

The author, A. M. DeWitt, has updated this page.

I once made a wild guess and decided that the maniacs army should have pieces worth roughly 133% of the values of the normal pieces.
Rs are replaced with Maniac Fourfers
Ns are replaced with Maniac N2s
Bs are replaced with Maniac B4nDs
Q is replaced with Maniac Acme
I called it Bearable Berserkers. Guess I should rename the army to something that ends with Maniacs.
They have not been playtested so I'd like ID to support Mandatory capture.
Currently you can only make Maniac pieces with a long Betza string. E.g. Maniac Wazir=cWomdaubaromdaubaromdaubaromdaubarmW
Not sure about Sirenes.
Can you reply a check with moving a Sirene to a square attacked by the piece delivering the check?
Edit: How do I delete a comment I entered without a verified ID?
In Bearable Berserkers, Maniac is a piece that only prevents itself from traveling but doesn't prevent others from moving.

Interesting: when I coined the term 'Maniac' I was in doubt whether to call it maniac or berserker. I finally chose maniac because I had already used Berserker as a piece name in Macadamia Shogi.

Offering a Sirene to 'distract' a checking piece is an interesting dilemma. I suppose strictly speaking non-captures would still be pseudo-legal moves even when a capture is possible, as their legality depends on the board situation outside the path of the move. So if checking is defined as a pseudo-legal attack on the King (as FIDE rules do), offering the Sirene would not solve it. But there is another way to look at this, which is that King capture instantly terminates the game, so that you can never expose your own King to any retaliation through it. King capture would then never be illegal due to the checking rule. But it could still be illegal due to the mandatory-capture rule. So the reasoning then would be that winning by King capture would have to be done by a legal move, but that pseudo-legal moves do not become illegal by exposing their King. (But could still be illegal by other global rules, such as blowing up your own King in the process, as in Atomic Chess, or an adjacent Immobilizer.) Then distraction by a Sirene would be an allowed method of check evasion.

I think the latter interpretation of checking is more suitable for chess variants, where you can have pieces that affect each other in all kind of ways.

Weirweb

But 960.

I now introduced the concept of 'prioritized moves', which is a generalization of mandatory capture. Through the captureMatrix you can now specify in a type-specific way which captures are mandatory. A tilde (~) there would indicate the corresponding capture is prioritized. If a prioritized move is legal, all non-prioritized moves are forbidden. Mandatory capture can then be implemented by prioritizing all captures (captureMatrix=.~6/"/"/"/"/" if there are 6 piece types).

I made the following Diagram to test this: as extra pieces on 10x8 there are a Siren (b1/b8) and a Maniac (i1/i8). Capturing a Siren as well as all captures by a Maniac are prioritized. Only a single priority class is supported, so if both (say) QxS and MxP are possible you can freely choose between those. The Siren moves as King (to not make it too easy to use it as bait for catching a valuable opponent), the Maniac can jump to any desination in the 5x5 area centerd on it (KNAD), which is a short-range move, to not make it too easy to draw it out.

Only the latest betzaNew.js supports this, so flush your browser cache, and view in isolation (so other Diagrams on the same page using betza.js do not spoil it). It might be worth posting this as an article ('Siren Chess').

Anti-Anti-Chess960

I suppose this would be easier to implement, at least at the level of pseudo-legal moves. A piece could have not a single, but a set of move descriptions (e.g. specified by a comma-separated list of XBetza notations). And the move generator would fall back on the next descriptor in the list whenever a descriptor fails to result in any moves.

If the rule would be that having some pseudo-legal moves which happen to be illegal should also allow fallback on the next descriptor, it would harder to implement in the AI. Because illegality of the move will only be discovered when a move has already been searched deep enough to also consider replies. And if a move of a piece that can have fallback would turn out illegal at that stage, it would have to figure out whether that was the only remaining move in the move list for that piece, and if so, turn back to generation to add the fall-back moves.

But of course there is less need to allow fallback in case the primary moves that exist are illegal; one could simply consider the piece pinned in that case. Like pieces that have no fallback would be; these often cannot move at all either. For globally mandatory moves that would be a bit unnatural, because it could potentially freeze all pieces if all mandatory moves would happen to be illegal, and thus lead to strange stalemates.

I am curious about your to do list in two ways. It will also be helpful to know these two things, because their moving forward or not, influences my path of designing and testing new games.

1. Do you intend to implement the generalizations for the joker that we were talking about?
2. Any progress in your very general C++ AI?

I am writing programs of my own for the games I'm designing, but even if I'm moving forward I'm not very fast. Also later on I'll need advice from you (because I don't know where else I can ask) in writing a xiangqi, shogi and chu shogi(or more likely apothecary versions for that :) ) AIs.

Once again thanks for your time. By the way, why is scirocco one of your favorites? It is a bit complex. I'm asking because my creations are considered too complex too. I decided to tone down things (no more brouhaha squares, for example), but I'm interested in what makes a game with a steppe learning curve interesting.

Breton Chess with extra steps.

Minotaur Halls

But with shuffle.

Woody Rook in Interactive Diagram uses warmachineferz graphics instead of warmachinewazir.

Since when are spam messages approved as Comments? The author is not a member, so he should not have been able to post anything here without supervision. And what is worse, he seems to have found a way to make the Comment impossible to edit; I get an error message from the database when I try to submit a modification.

To get you going I have now made the preliminary change in betzaNew.js that it uses a predefined array 'imiTable' to decide what is imitated. If no such array is defined, the I.D. creates one, and initializes it as imiTable[i] = i for standard imitator behavior. It can be defined by embeded JavaScript in the page. (Which would then affect all Diagrams on that page!) In this comment I embedded:

This causes a move of type 1 (Pawn) to make the Joker move as 2 (Knight), etc. View in isolation, flushing browser cache to make it work!