TalkChess.com

This has been discussed a couple of times here. Look up posts by HGM on the topic (use the forum search). The short form is this: for sliders it is hard to derive an empirical expression based on the move set because they can be blocked and so have highly variable mobility. Part of their value comes...

SjaakII can do that. “Perft 6 1” does a distributed perft to depth 6 and outputs node counts for every move at ply 1.

Try a distributed perft, where you see the node counts for each node at ply 1. Then, make the move for which the node counts are off and repeat until you get to a position where you’re off at depth 1.

You need to add an evaluation term so the program can see progress. Programs start shuffling pieces if the evaluation is stuck in a local optimum. The program tries to maximise its score by staying close to this position. A trick that may help is to drag the score closer to 0 as the half-move clock ...

Well, let’s consider both logically. If a move delivers check, there are three things to check: 1. Does the evacuation of the from square expose a checking piece (which includes gated pieces, I suppose)? 2. Does the moving piece deliver a direct check? 3. Does the occupation of the target square act...

Wait, I’m confused.
Are you talking about a proper historical variant? Or are you talking about a game you invented?

I used Gentoo for a long time. It’s neat, portage is a great package manager and you do get to tweak everything. Keeping the ststem up to date became a bit of a chore though (you can mostly put it on a cron job, but still...) and updating outdated systems isn’t a thing. Switching to a new version of...

An advantage of KxR is that you don’t have to look for the rook, since its location is right there in the move. It’s a reasonably elegant solution if this is the only really weird move you have to deal with (of course you also have en-passant and promotionsto consider).

After noobpawnftw told me that dtm50 is not perfect. [...] DTM50 is both bulky and troublesome compared to DTM. What exactly is "not perfect" and "troublesome" with DTM50? DTZ50 may be perfect in theory, but it suffers from a laughable practical quirk. Look at Diagram 4 below. 2k5/8/K7/7p/7N/8/3Q4/...

I think this is a really interesting project, with a lot of potential. Also sadly one that I lack the time and resources to look into myself.
I’ll be very interested to hear about your results.