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Dimachaer ChessA game information page . Introducing the Dimachaer, a bifurcation piece that always lands on the diagonal second leg (zrf available).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Oct 12, 2009 09:02 PM UTC:
I tested the Secutor, and (as expctd) it is stronger than the Dimachaer. Where a pair of Dimachaers clearly lost against a pair of Knights, (scoring only 44%) a pair of Secutors beat the Knights by 53% (over 1000 games). This was with the Secutor value set slightly below that of the Knight, so that the side playing the Secutors would trade them for Knights if he got the opportunity (and its opponent tried to avoid such trades).

I tried the same match with the value of the Secutor set higher than that of the Knight. In that case the Secutors won by 53.4%, i.e. not significantly better. (Statistical error is 1.3%..) So the opening value of the Secutor is marginaly stronger than the Knight (5-10 cP), but when you program a constant value for it during the game it doesn't hurt much if you choose that below the value of a Knight. This is likely caused by the fact that the value of the Secutor drops during the game, so that the average value during the game might very wel be below a Knight's value.

It is quite possible that the empirical value of the Dimachaer and Secutor would go up a little with better handling, e.g. when the value would be allowed to vary with the piece density. In that case the Secutor sid would initially avoid trading them for Bishops and Knights, in order to make use of their superior tactical possibilities on a densely populated board to create an advantage. But as the material thins out, it would start to seek trading it for Knight and Bishop, and conversely would try to avoid trading other material as long as it was still stuck with the Secutors (because it would devaluate them).