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Aberg variation of Capablanca's Chess. Different setup and castling rules. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H.G.Muller wrote on Sat, Apr 19, 2008 08:15 AM UTC:

'Also, you might try to figure out the strength of a piece that can move
as
a queen and a knight. Call this piece say 'General' or G. One might use
an 12x8 board. One setup might be (white pieces)
  R C N B A Q K G B N C R
It is derived by imposing the condition that all pawns are protected by a
quality piece in the start position.'

I prefer to call this piece 'Amazon': the name 'General' is already
taken by several Shogi pieces, where the various brands of Generals are
all more or less handicapped Kings. Furthermore, Ferz means 'General',
and indeed can be described as a handicapped King. Although in English one
uses the Persian name for this piece (like for the Rook), most other
languages don't, and overloading the name 'General' would cause
problems in translation.

That being said: I ran a preliminary test for determining the Amazon value
(on a slow laptop, as my main PC is tied up in running the 'Battle of the
Goths' Championship), by playing games where one side had an Amazon in
stead of Q+N. I did this on 10x8 from the Capablanca setup (removing the
Queen's Knight and replacing Queen by Amazon), because there the piece
values are accurately known. I did not want to use 12x8, because I have no
piece values there for the pieces against which I would compare the
Amazon.

After 116 games, the Amazon is leading by 51.3% (52+ 49- 15=). The
statistical error over 116 games is 4.3%, though, so this difference with
equality if far below significance. At these settings (40/2' on a 1.3GHz
Pentium-M) the Pawn-odds score is about 62%, so the observed difference
corresponds to 10cP +/- 35cP. It thus seems there is hardly any synergy
between Q and N moves, and the values simply add. In other words, Q is
already so powerful that it doesn't really need the Knight moves, and
they provide little 'extra' in terms of making it possible to use the
moves it already had more efficiently.

To make this a hard conclusion, though, I would have to play better
quality games (either 40/5', or 4/2' on my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo), as the
current setting is at the brink of underestimating the Knight because of
lack of depth in the end-game to use it efficiently, play at least 400 of
them, try sevral other piece combinations (e.g. also against C+B and A+B)
and average over a few different opening setups. That would take a few
days when I have my C2D machine available again.