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Chess with Different Armies. Betza's classic variant where white and black play with different sets of pieces. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Jeremy Lennert wrote on Sun, Mar 11, 2012 01:01 AM UTC:

Thanks, Muller.  This is a neat little tool.

Could you go into a little more detail about how the columns work when some of the pieces are colorbound?  With two colorbound pieces, I get two columns in rep2.txt, which appear to be same-color and different-color, respectively.  But with 3 colorbound pieces, I get 4 columns, one of which is all zeroes (including its total board positions), and none of them are labeled.  (Also, none of them are identical, even when all 3 colorbound pieces are the same piece-type and owned by the same player...)

I did some experimenting with mismatched royal pieces.  Interesting result:  while it is commonly known that KNN v K is drawn, it appears that NK v K (that is, a single royal knight + commoner vs. king) is generally won!  (89% won with black to move, longest win 29 moves, if I'm reading these results correctly.)  I suppose that shows the value of sacrifice.

How difficult do you think it would be to modify this code to accommodate 'lame' leapers, bent riders, crooked riders, and/or pieces with only 2-fold symmetry?