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Grand Betza. A tribute to Ralph Betza on a 10x10 board with pawns on the third rank as in Grand Chess.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, May 26, 2021 05:37 PM UTC in reply to Greg Strong from 05:12 PM:

That XBetza supports it also means you should be able to generate the GAME code for it with the Play-Test Applet. It could be slow, though.

This because the implementation works through decomposing the slide as a number of lame leaps of various distances. So it retraces the same complete path many times, each time a bit longer, rather than just adding the next step to an already verified path.

The Betza interpreter in the GAME code would allow you to do the latter; it has a special format for storing 'irregular slides', (for the benefit of crookev and circular pieces), where each leg indicates through a special flag that the move can also terminate there. (By default all legs of a move would have to be performed.) So that you only have to store the maximum-length move. To get a faster version you could generate GAME code with the Rhino defined as zB, and then hand-edit the step vectors in the generated table to turn them into Rhino moves.

E.g. one of the 8 zB trajectories appears in the table as

7  1  1  1   1048579 // rhino(60)
   1  1 -1   1048579
   1  1  1   1048579
   1  1 -1   1048579
   1  1  1   1048579
   1  1 -1   1048579
   1  1  1     3

 

When you change all the (1,1) steps into (1,0) steps it becomes an efficient Rhino implementation:

7  1  1  0   1048579 // rhino(60)
   1  1 -1   1048579
   1  1  0   1048579
   1  1 -1   1048579
   1  1  0   1048579
   1  1 -1   1048579
   1  1  0     3