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Play Chess Variants with Jocly. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Mar 21, 2024 08:52 PM UTC in reply to François Houdebert from 07:43 PM:

Yes, I am already working on the others. For some the custom evaluation was entirely wrong. (E.g. in Elven Chess the testing for insufficient mating material made no sense, as by using fairy-piece-model all type numbers had changed. And the bonus for advance Pawns did not take into account that the promotion zone was 3 ranks rather than 1, and was only awarding the bonus when the Pawns were already in the zone.)

And Aanca is indeed Acromentula. I thought I had replaced that everywhere, but apparently I missed some.

[Edit] I have now fixed the obvious evaluation errors in my non-Shogi variants. But:

  • Makromachy has no dedicated evaluation at all. So it won't encourage Pawns to advance, no matter what set of eval parameters it uses, and it won't recognize insufficient mating material. (But it is so large that the latter might not matter.)
  • Scirocco needs to encourage many other pieces than Pawns to advance towards the zone. Especially the very slow ones, such as Ferz, Wazir, Steward and Commoner, but to a lesser extent also the range-2 leapers Alfil, Dababbah, Stork, Goat and the enhanced Knights.
  • That holds also for other Shogi variants without drops. (Scirocco is a sort of Chess-Shogi hybrid.)
  • Minjiku Shogi currently also has no dedicated evaluation.
  • Chu Shogi still has the unmodifed Classic Chess evaluation, basing its 'insufficiant mating material' judgement on the idea that piece types 4 and 5 are Knight and Bishop, and Pawns promote on last rank only.
  • Shogi, Tori Shogi and mini-Shogi have empty evaluation functions. They would really need some King-Safety term to play sensibly.