Single Comment

Out of the 3 options offerred for castling in SMIRF, I chose 'symmetric'
castling for Optimized Chess 8H x 10W.  This destroyed my plan to compare
the strengths of SMIRF and Gothic Vortex III at this game by letting them
fight it out at 3 minutes per move since the latter program exclusively
supports traditional or 'normal' castling as exists in Gothic Chess.

It is particularly gracious of Scharnagl to support symmetric castling
within SMIRF, esp. since he has stated clearly that he personally prefers
normal castling.  To date, I suspect that a good reason to prefer
symmetric castling has not been explained.

Any unique game is singular in nature, regardless of whether it exhibits
an east-west symmetry or asymmetry.  However, unlike E-W symmetrical games
which always exist as 1 unified, opening setup, E-W asymmetrical games are
split so they always exist irreducibly as 2 mirror-image opening setups
which can be transposed into one another.  Obviously, neither one is any
more or less proper than the other.  

Of course, most inventors only offer 1 of these 2 mirror-image, opening
setups as the asymmetrical game and most players, on the rare occasion
that a choice between 2 is offerred, will always prefer to learn using
just 1 of them.

Ideally, the king would be perfectly centered by E-W measure so that
castling would naturally be the same between the 'Mirror I' and 'Mirror
II' variants of Opti Chess.  Unfortunately, this is obviously impossible
as the '10W' in the game title gives a strong clue.  An odd, NOT even,
number of files must exist for it to be possible to perfectly center any
single piece E-W.

The opening setups in Mirror I and Mirror II have the 2 rooks balanced
perfectly, equidistantly, symmetrically E-W from the center of the board.

The opening setups in Mirror I and Mirror II have the king as close to the
exact E-W center of the board as possible which is unfortunately, the line
dividing the 5th and 6th files.  Consequently, the king rests on the 6th
file square in Mirror I and the 5th file square in Mirror II.

With normal castling, the king and rook will end-up on destination squares
that are asymmetrical from the exact E-W center of the board within both
variants AND on destination squares that are different when comparing both
variants.

With symmetric castling, the king and rook will end-up on destination
squares that are symmetrical and identical within and between both
variants.  Essentially, a simple average of the results of normal castling
for Mirror I & II is taken which yields whole numbers.  

By contrast, one can wonder (with dark humor) how the person(s) who
established the standard for normal castling kept from going crazy when
you realize ...

In deciding exactly where to drop the pieces kingside and queenside, in
turn, they had to decide whether it was more proper to round-off exactly
1/2 square's distance to zero square's distance or 1 square's distance.
Even Dr. Mark Thompson could not answer that one!